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THE DEMOCRATIC MISTAKE 



THE 
DEMOCRATIC MISTAKE 

GODKIN LECTURES OF 1909 
DELIVERED AT HARVARD UNIVERSITY 



BY 

ARTHUR GEORGE SEDGWICK 



NEW YORK 

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
1912 




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Copyright, igia, by 
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 



Published August, IQ12 




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PREFACE 

Since delivering these lectures in the spring 
of 1909, I have not had an opportunity to re- 
vise them until now. They are printed sub- 
stantially as delivered; for the sake of clearness, 
part of the first has been transferred to the 
second, thus shortening the former, and length- 
ening the latter. I have avoided, as far as 
possible, attempting to enforce my points by 
referring to later aspects of the questions under 
discussion, presented by recent events. If the 
view taken of the matter is sound, the passage 
of time is sure to furnish new instances, and 
the reader will have no difficulty in making 
the application himself. As delivered, the title 
of the lectures was "Some Unsettled Questions 
Relating to Popular Government." 

A. G. S. 

New York, May^ 191 2. 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

I Government by Design i 

II Responsibility 33 

III The Democratic Mistake .... 85 

IV Patronage and the Machine . . . 115 
V Limitations 155 

VI The Suffrage 189 



LECTURE I 
GOVERNMENT BY DESIGN 



GOVERNMENT BY DESIGN 

In receiving last year the very flattering invi- 
tation of the University to deliver these lectures, 
I felt that the request must be chiefly due to 
the fact of my having been for many years 
associated with the writer in whose honor the 
course had been founded. To his readers at 
large he was a journalist who spent his life in 
applying to public questions, constantly arising 
and demanding a speedy answer, the test of a 
rare skill, knowledge, and experience, and a 
devotion perhaps still rarer to the cause of good 
government; in the performance of this task, 
without fear or favor, and with unflinching 
endurance and remarkable success, he attained 
a commanding position and influence. To those 
who came into contact with him and shared his 
interest in political matters, he was something 
more than this; he was one of the writers (the 
list is not a very long one) devoted by their 
natural bent to the subject of the work of 
government, who have made substantial addi- 

3 



4 THE DEMOCRATIC MISTAKE 

tions to our knowledge of the subject, and of 
whom it may be said with regard to many im- 
portant topics: but for him we should not have 
understood this. 

What he wrote, for instance, about nomina- 
tions, and the dominant part they play in 
modern popular government, what he had to 
say about the decline of legislatures, govern- 
ment of cities, and what is called the "new" 
political economy, and Socialism, dispel some 
of the obscurity which surrounds these subjects, 
so that no one who investigates them can now 
afford to neglect his contributions to this branch 
of knowledge. 

In recalling this it struck me that I might 
make these lectures of use, if at all, by endeavor- 
ing to examine and state the theory of political 
action as it seems to be implied (though not 
systematically analyzed and expounded) in his 
writings; attempting in the course of this ex- 
amination to apply it to some of the unsettled 
questions which in our day, as in his, press 
upon us for an answer, and which our form of 
government forces us to answer as best we may. 
If in the course of our inquiry we do not discover 
anything very novel, I must ask you to remem- 



GOVERNMENT BY DESIGN 5 

ber that it is a very old and very difficult sub- 
ject, in which new discoveries are seldom made. 
Such an attempt may, however, be the means 
of putting some of the old questions in a new 
light, and help us toward reaching some con- 
clusion as to the future of popular government. 
If the path followed by him should prove to 
be a continuation of that opened by the famous 
investigators of the past, it may serve to 
strengthen our confidence in the possibility of 
further progress. 

You will notice that my subject relates only 
to one aspect of government. Government as 
a whole embraces a great variety of topics. 
Such matters as sovereignty, the sphere or 
province of government, and the ideal or per- 
fect state; the object, origin, and forms of 
government; government of the family, the 
tribe, and the church, the nature and powers 
of government, municipal and federal govern- 
ment; all are parts of a very complex whole, 
which also includes a further subject of inquiry 
— the structure and framework of the govern- 
ment of a State, or, in other words, its consti- 
tution by human design and contrivance. Now, 
as government is merely public business carried 



6 THE DEMOCRATIC MISTAKE 

on by men for certain recognized ends, there 
must be behind its structure and framework 
some force or power, and some principle of 
action, which can, through human will and 
motive, accompHsh the pohtical tasks set it; 
and the question is: can any principle of action 
be traced in popular government? And to come 
to the questions of the day, can we learn 
through an examination of the principle of its 
action anything about these questions? Does 
it throw any Hght on the referendum, or the 
initiative, or recall, or direct primaries, or nomi- 
nations by petition, or the "machine," or the 
suffrage ? 

It is simply to the constitutional operation of 
government, and especially of popular govern- 
ment, so far as it is a work of human contriv- 
ance and design, that I wish chiefly to direct 
your attention. 

But at the outset any one who attempts this 
is confronted by a serious difficulty. He finds 
not only that there is still no general agreement 
about the basis of political theory, but that 
there is actually a greater diversity of theory 
than there has ever been. Professor Lowell,^ 

^ Now President Lowell. 



GOVERNMENT BY DESIGN 7 

in his recent volumes on the Government of 
England/ citing Taine in his support, declares 
that one feels like exclaiming, "I have dis- 
covered only one political principle, that a hu- 
man society, and especially a modern society, 
is a vast and complex thing'* and that "the 
only conclusion one can draw with certainty is 
that in a given environment a certain combina- 
tion of causes produces the consequences that 
we observe,'' and that whether the same causes 
would produce exactly the same results else- 
where we cannot predict. Now, taken literally, 
this seems to leave us altogether without po- 
litical theory. More closely examined, however, 
in the light of the whole book, Mr. Lowell, in 
his statement of his conclusion, does not mean 
to go so far. For without some theory we can- 
not be sure that the consequences we observe 
in a particular state are -produced by a certain 
combination of causes. In England there is a 
highly paid judiciary, with a tenure during 
good behavior; the judges in general are ap- 
pointed nominally by the Crown, on the recom- 
mendation of the Lord Chancellor, one of the 
heads of the bar. The Bench is distinguished for 
^Vol. II, p. 506. 



8 THE DEMOCRATIC MISTAKE 

its learning, independence, character, and au- 
thority. Is this a case of cause and effect ? From 
what do we infer that it is? An isolated case 
proves nothing. And what is cause and what 
effect? As it stands, we merely have a descrip- 
tion of facts. Is it the King, or the Lord Chan- 
cellor, or their joint action, that gives England 
good judges? Or is it the tenure, or the salary? 
In the city of New York most of the judges are 
nominated by a representative convention at 
the suggestion of a private individual and are 
said to require backers ready to pay a very large 
sum of money for a nomination. The result is 
almost universally criticised as unsatisfactory. 
Without some general theory of political cause 
and effect, it seems hard to throw any light on 
the cause by an argument from English experi- 
ence. One system produces a good result; the 
other an unsatisfactory one. Surely we must 
inquire what difference of cause it is which pro- 
duces such a difference of result. 

To those who merely glance at Mr. Lowell's 
conclusion it seems to put forward formally a 
species of agnosticism about government which 
I do not beHeve he intends to maintain, but 
which is very popular at the present time, and 



GOVERNMENT BY DESIGN 9 

extremely convenient for those who wish to dis- 
miss the whole subject from their minds on the 
ground of a supposed discovery that govern- 
ment can be nothing more or less than what it 
happens at a given moment and in a given place 
to be. 

In reality I take Mr. Lowell's position to be 
quite different from this, because in other parts 
of his book he makes general observations of a 
searching character, which are evidently based 
on a general theory of the way in which man acts 
politically. For instance,^ "there is probably 
no body of men less fitted to rule a people than 
a representative assembly elected in another 
land by a different race." And again^ he says 
that office-holders, if doomed to lose their places 
on a defeat at the polls of the party in power, 
"will certainly do their utmost,'' i. e,y by po- 
litical activity, "to avert such a defeat." "The 
keeping out of poHtics" and "the permanence 
of tenure must in the long run go together." 

On the whole, comparing such passages as 
these with his general conclusion, and with what 
he has written elsewhere, the safest inference is 
that he wishes to emphasize the difficulty of 

1 Vol. I, p. 90. * Vol. I, p. 147. 



lo THE DEMOCRATIC MISTAKE 

establishing firm theoretic ground as to govern- 
ment, not to exclude the possibility of it. This, 
therefore, is a wholly different position from that 
pure agnosticism which would sound the knell 
of political theory altogether, and relegate it to 
what Carlyle used to call the dust heap. 

But it is not at all the position taken by all 
the world. Down to the period of the Civil War, 
our hand-book of government was the Constitu- 
tion as expounded by the authors of the Fed- 
eralist, Theirs were the great contributions of 
America to political knowledge, and even now 
it is usually admitted that they made the best 
use possible for the purpose in view of all that 
was then known on the subject. But there are 
many who tell us now that they were funda- 
mentally wrong, or, at any rate, that we have 
outgrown what they wrote. Dr. Woodrow 
Wilson, the head of a university, and well- 
known as a writer on government, puts forward 
a radically new view of the matter. 

In his work on constitutional government in 
the United States,^ he says that the writers of 
the Federalist, following Montesquieu, made 
him a scientific standard, with the result that 

1 Page 56. 



GOVERNMENT BY DESIGN ii 

*' politics is turned into mechanics" under his 
touch, and "the theory of gravitation is su- 
preme." In this he thinks that they made a 
mistake, because the system of "checks and 
balances" is based on a theory of "bhnd 
forces," like those of nature, while government 
is "not a machine," but a "living thing," "ac- 
countable to Darwin, not to Newton." 

Mr. Graham Wallas, in his "Human Nature in 
Politics, " looks at the matter from another point 
of view. The study of government, he observes, 
is in an unsatisfactory position. The early study 
of government always went hand in hand with 
the study of Man, and about the middle of the 
last century it seemed to have reached a con- 
clusion in the pretty general adoption of repre- 
sentative and democratic institutions; but the 
results of the democratic movement have pro- 
duced much dissatisfaction. This has led to a 
new historical study of institutions, customs, 
manners, and man himself; and on these a 
flood of Kght has been thrown. On the other 
hand, but little attention has been recently given 
in works on government to the facts of human 
nature, although modern psychology has made 
great advances in its own field. .Now, if the 



12 THE DEMOCRATIC MISTAKE 

study of government is necessarily founded 
upon a combined inquiry into the nature of 
man and the nature of government, the present 
** tendency to separate the study of politics from 
that of human nature" should "prove to be 
only a momentary phase of thought." Its 
effects, while it lasts, however, are likely to be 
harmful, and there are already signs that it is 
coming to an end.^ He thinks, therefore, that 
the student of politics should begin "by mas- 
tering a treatise on psychology containing all 
those facts about the human type which have 
been shown by experience to be helpful in 
politics, and so arranged that the student's 
knowledge could be most easily recalled when 
wanted."^ 

It may be admitted at once that these three 
views are all based upon real and important 
facts. It is true that transplanted institutions 
do not necessarily thrive, and that we cannot 
predict that the same causes will reproduce 
exactly the same results elsewhere, and that we 
have made a great advance in discovering this. 
It is true that government has been found to 
be a developing organism, which you may, if 

1 Page 15. * Page 123. 



GOVERNMENT BY DESIGN 13 

you choose, liken to a living organism, for it 
is an institution developed by man, and man 
himself is a product of evolution; though when 
Dr. Wilson says that Hamilton, following 
Montesquieu, turned politics into mechanics, 
and made the theory of gravitation supreme, 
and based a theory of checks and balances on 
"bKnd forces," I am bound to say that I have 
not been able to find in the Federalist or in 
Uesprit des Lois the foundation for the state- 
ment. So, too, Mr. Wallas has every reason for 
insisting that if we are to make any further 
progress in the study of government as a human 
institution we must found it upon certain definite 
assumptions as to the nature of man. 

All three views are of interest as an illustra- 
tion of the fact that government is always pre- 
senting to the inquirer more and more different 
sides. Mr. Lowell, impressed with the vast 
complexity of causation in government, warns 
us not to believe in the delusion that because an 
institution produces certain effects under one 
set of circumstances it will produce the same 
effects under totally different circumstances; 
Dr. Wilson, impressed with the fact of evolution 
in the animal and vegetable worlds in connec- 



14 THE DEMOCRATIC MISTAKE 

tion with the struggle for existence, finds some- 
thing of the same sort going on in government; 
Mr. Wallas, observing the lack of any agree- 
ment as to first principles, is struck with the 
fact that for a generation or two we have been 
so devoted to examining government objectively 
that we have forgotten that a knowledge of 
government without some idea of Man is im- 
possible. The Sociologists have a view of their 
own, but it is altogether too vast for analysis 
here. If you will go on and examine twenty 
recent writers on government, you will find that 
this same peculiarity of great diversity in the 
points from which they approach the subject 
runs through them all. 

None of these views conflicts with a fact, 
the importance of which can hardly be dis- 
puted, certainly not by Americans, for it is 
the assumption which underlies all constitutions 
consciously contrived for the government of 
free states, viz., that government is not merely 
something to be observed and described, but 
also something to be done by means of power 
or force employed to effect the object. It is 
a branch of knowledge, but it also is a branch of 
action, or one of what used to be called the moral 



GOVERNMENT BY DESIGN 15 

sciences. Government is a task which is under- 
taken in order to effect objects of some sort. Its 
purposes may be of every variety. It may be 
to found a dynasty or to estabHsh a free state, 
to administer a province, to carry on a war, 
or to raise a revenue. It may be to do good or 
to do evil; but a government without any pur- 
pose at all is hardly conceivable. Now a gov- 
ernment with an object means that some man 
or men make use among other things of the 
power of other men's wills to effect the object 
in view, and to do this they must have a dis- 
tinct idea of how, by what means, they can pro- 
duce the effects they desire. To produce an 
effect by means of any power we must have 
some idea of causation in relation to it. Through 
observation of ourselves and others, and of gov- 
ernment itself, we must believe that certain 
poHtical arrangements lead through the motive 
power of human volition and action to certain 
results. This belief involves a theory of po- 
litical action. If it is founded on a mistaken 
idea of cause and effect, it will be disproved by 
experience; but there must be behind any po- 
litical contrivance or institution founded on 
design a theory of this sort. The necessity of a 



i6 THE DEMOCRATIC MISTAKE 

theory for the work of government is no greater 
and no less than the necessity of a theory of 
education for any one who proposes to train 
the young, or a theory of mihtary or naval dis- 
cipHne, or the management of a railway. It 
may be crude and simple, but there is no way 
of causing anything to be done by human beings 
without a prevision of the means to be selected 
to effect it, founded upon a theory of how men 
can be got to carry out the design of other men. 
Looking at the matter in this way, we cannot 
but regard the manner in which we know po- 
litical study to have developed as what might 
have been expected. Government would have 
been introduced and established as a convenient 
and essential institution long before it would 
have occurred to any one to inquire on what it 
was founded;^ and when the inquiry began it 
would have been conducted as a single inquiry, 
as if we could first determine what the nature of 
government was as a whole, and what the nature 
of man was as a whole, and thus solve the ques- 
tion of the nature and scope of politics. As long 
as this idea lasted we should have a great de- 
bate, but within a comparatively narrow com- 

* There is something closely resembling it even among animals. 



GOVERNMENT BY DESIGN 17 

pass. But as it began to be perceived that gov- 
ernment was a name for a vast variety of causes, 
effects, and phenomena of all sorts pervading 
human society, and stretching from the dawn 
of history to the present time, and on into the 
unfathomed future, and that man was a name 
for a very great variety of races, differing among 
themselves in every way that human beings 
can differ, and existing in every stage of bar- 
barism and civilization, and as immense stores 
of knowledge as to past history, customs, habits, 
and institutions accumulated, it would become 
clearer and clearer that the problem was in- 
definitely complex. Consequently the time 
would come when the discussion would present 
as many different aspects as the problem itself, 
and the theory would divide itself into as many 
different lines as there were seen to be branches 
of inquiry. Such a stage of political inquiry we 
seem to have reached; and, having reached it, 
we are now able, as our predecessors were un- 
able, to discriminate sharply between the line of 
inquiry to which I propose to direct your at- 
tention — that which relates to the operation of 
government by human design — and all other 
branches. 



1 8 THE DEMOCRATIC MISTAKE 

As good an illustration as any of what is 
meant by a theory of cause and effect relating 
to political action is afforded by the case of the 
judiciary already referred to. 

Experience tells us that there are a variety 
of causes at work in England which are not at 
work in New York, and that if we eliminate 
causes known to have nothing to do with the 
matter we may find in the end the efficient 
causes which tend to produce a good judiciary; 
and that these are a tenure during good be- 
havior, a nomination by those whose interest is 
only to select a good candidate, an absolutely 
non-political appointment, and a salary which 
places the incumbent ^a&ove either the sus- 
picion or the temptation of corruption. We find 
that the same result follows whenever this 
method is pursued; for instance, we find in the 
United States a good federal judiciary side by 
side with a less satisfactory State judiciary. 
We find the same result in England, New Jersey, 
and Massachusetts — utterly different communi- 
ties. We infer from all this that it is not a King 
or a Lord Chancellor that we lack in New York, 
but a secure tenure and a good nominating 
system. Moreover, all this reasoning is con- 



GOVERNMENT BY DESIGN 19 

firmed a priori by our knowledge of ourselves ''^' 
and of man in general. We know that a judge 
dependent upon the favor of one man and the 
money of another man, or even his own, for 
nomination and election, and again on the same 
favor for contLquance in office and promotion, 
is unlikely to prc^e what we want, even if we 
pay him a large salary; the best men will not 
take office on such terms, but will prefer private 
employment; the men who do take it will be 
under constant temptation to requite the favor, 
and they will most easily requite the favor by 
favors, and will in consequence sometimes either 
be, or, what is as bad, jDe ^suspected of being, 
corrupt. From all thrSyWe infer that wherever 
you introduce the New. York system your ju- 
diciary will tend to run down; wherever you 
introduce the English, or the Federal, the Mas- 
sachusetts or the New Jersey system, you will 
do better, indeed as well as you can do. In any 
government the introduction of the system is a 
matter of prevision and design. 

Again, to take another instance, the perma- 
nent civil service has, in England, for two 
generations, taken the place of a civil service 
manned by means of patronage. The reform of 



20 THE DEMOCRATIC MISTAKE 

our civil service has been copied from the 
EngHsh system, and the argument on which its 
introduction was based was merely this: that 
as the competitive system of examination for 
entrance, combined with promotion for merit 
and a secure tenure, had, in England, driven 
the poison of intrigue and patronage (developed 
here into "rotation in office") out of the govern- 
ment, so it would accomplish the same result 
here. The argument by which the change from 
our old system was supported was very like that 
relating to the judiciary. From what we know 
of man, we know that patronage for a large 
body of civil servants, whether party or indi- 
vidual patronage, means appointment by whim, 
or favor, or for partisan activity, or for still 
worse motives, and not for fitness; and that 
the only way to bring intrigue and corruption 
in the service to an end is to take patronage 
away altogether; that the only substitute under 
the circumstances is selection by open competi- 
tion and tenure during good behavior; and 
that all this has been verified by experience. 

To make a long story short, there must always 
be a theory of political action, and it is devel- 
oped by experience of the nature of man, and 



GOVERNMENT BY DESIGN 21 

the study of cause and effect. This study and 
the experience on which it is founded have been 
going on for ages, and have produced definite 
results, the most important of which is that we 
now know finally how to do certain things in 
government almost as well as how to do certain 
things in a physical science. They can be done 
by those who are fitted to undertake the task. 
The Greeks did not know how to secure an 
upright and efficient judiciary; we do. They 
had very vague ideas of military and naval or- 
ganization. We know how to manage miHtary 
power and how to create a navy. There are 
certain principles of taxation and currency 
which, once grasped, are a permanent addition 
to political knowledge, which two or three cen- 
turies ago were not even dreamed of. We may 
reject the light and follow the darkness, but 
that is a matter of choice, not necessity. 

A brief review of some of the more salient 
facts in the history of political inquiry may 
serve to make clearer this point as to the nature 
of political action. 

All knowledge advances through dispassion- 
ate observation, study, and experiment; but 
questions of government so directly affect our 



22 THE DEMOcii'ATIC MISTAKE 

hopes, fears, tastes^^ prejudices, appetites, affec- 
tions, and passions that it is extremely difficult 
to examine them dispassionately at all. For 
primitive man it is impossible, and this is one 
of the reasons why we find primitive government 
always closely connected with rehgion and super- 
stition.^ It is of divine origin; those who es- 
tabHsh it are the progeny of gods; on the ob- 
servances of religion all success in government 
depends, and its laws have a divine sanction. 
Except in the United States, remains of the 
ancient connection between church and state 
exist to-day everywhere, and in'^niost modern 
states the connection is very important; in 
our time and country those who attacked slavery 
were met by the argument that it was of divine 
origin. In Italy it was only yesterday that the 
temporal power of the Pope disappeared. 

But no sooner does inquiry into government 
as a branch of secular knowledge begin than 
another cloud is thrown over it by metaphysics. 
In this stage, words, abstractions, and even 

^ What standing Comte has to-day as an authority in philosophy 
I do not know; it was his opinion that all knowledge passes 
through three stages, the religious, the metaphysical, and the 
positive. Whether true or not as a law of the mind, it gives for 
practical purposes a very good picture of the history of our 
knowledge of government. 



GOVERNMENT. BY DESIGN 23 

figments of the brain are Mistaken for things; 
and causes and mysterious powers and forces 
are attributed to them to solve political ques- 
tions. This stage has lasted to the present time 
and accounts for the violence of endless disputes 
about the "Nature of the State," and "Natural 
Rights," the "Social Contract," "Equality" 
and "Liberty," and "Social Justice." 

The third stage, that of positive knowledge, 
comes when we are able to make our political 
conceptions correspond with real objects, cease 
to personify generalizations or treat them as 
causes, and learn how to analyze -.them into 
their component parts and refason about them, 
if we choose, uninfluenced by religion or meta- 
physics. 

This stage came late.^ The revival of learn- 
ing did very little for government; in the whole 
period from the rediscovery of Aristotle down 
to the birth of our democracy, actual acquisi- 
tions of knowledge were scanty, while specula- 
tion still flourished in its stead. 

^ It must be remembered that these stages do not succeed each 
other in secular succession. In a given country they are most 
likely to overlap. In Japan probably all three exist side by side 
to-day. In the United States we are still grievously afflicted by 
metaphysics in politics. 



24 THE DEMOCRATIC MISTAKE 

Our day presents the most extraordinary con- 
trast. In every direction the practical, i. e., 
positive, knowledge of government has ad- 
vanced with giant strides, while superstition and 
speculation have fallen more and more into dis- 
credit. The battle which had raged for cen- 
turies over the "three forms" of government 
came to a sudden end about the middle of the 
nineteenth century and its echoes have died 
away. It can hardly be said any longer that it 
is believed by the educated that there is an 
absolute best government. Law, which is at 
least half of government, has been analyzed into 
its fundamental conceptions by one school of 
writers, while another has traced its origin back 
to the remote region where they are lost in 
status and custom. The source of government 
itself has been traced to the natural wants of 
primitive man, while biology has even found an 
explanation of how man inherited the earth. 
What was to Plato the mystery of the true 
sphere of government has resolved itself into a 
multitude of subordinate inquiries into the best 
means of promoting the general welfare. The 
mighty creations of the mind which, with the 
aid of scholastic dogma, took possession of spec- 



GOVERNMENT BY DESIGN 25 

ulation and blocked the path of inquiry have 
turned out to be not causes or real existences, 
but abstractions, generaHzations, ideals, often 
fitted now to aid and inspire the inquiry they 
had obstructed before. 

We must add to all this positive analysis and 
knowledge what from our point of view is more 
important — that we have proved through po- 
litical theory and experiment the possibility of 
accomplishing definite political objects by defi- 
nite political means, and of deliberately incor- 
porating in the body politic contrivances which, 
through the ordinary action of human motive, 
tend to promote the general welfare and ad- 
vance civilization through government itself. It 
is almost a commonplace that many of what 
once seemed political dreams have become the 
realities of our day. 

To mention only a few instances : the means 
as just stated, by which a good administration 
of justice can be secured, are no. longer matters 
of speculation; they are known; the means 
by which patronage and the evils of patronage 
can be eHminated from the public service are 
known; the way to destroy hereditary privilege 
and open the road to advancement to merit 



26 THE DEMOCRATIC MISTAKE 

is known. So too is it known how "natural 
rights" may be actually secured and how 
the tyranny of the Executive and his agents 
may be prevented. We have learned how to 
free church and state from one another and 
at the same time promote the welfare of 
both. 

By applying the principles learned under one 
set of circumstances to others, apparently wholly 
different, good administration has been planted 
and made to grow in such unpromising spots as 
the customs service of China, the fiscal service 
of Egypt. More remarkable than all. Orientals, 
supposed to be incapable of change, have in 
two generations grasped the meaning of political 
progress, and made out of an ancient and ap- 
parently stationary and helpless people a modern 
nation, sovereign and equal in peace and war 
with the nations from whom the lesson had been 
learned. 

These things seem to have been accomplished 
pari passu with the growth of free institutions; 
but little attention has been paid to the connec- 
tion between them and political theory. It is, 
however, this connection which is of such ex- 
treme practical importance. If politics were 



GOVERNMENT BY DESIGN 27 

really nothing but a growth, in which custom 
changes into law, and status into contract, and 
individual property develops out of communal, 
and aristocracies succeed monarchies and de- 
mocracies aristocracies, and liberty produces 
license and license despotism, all our growth in 
knowledge would only confirm that primitive 
fatalism from which popular government by de- 
sign was to rescue us. But if political theory 
can be used to achieve definite ends by definite 
means, then we seem to stand upon the threshold 
of a new world, in which we may look forward 
to indefinite progress. 

Any theory of government by design, as al- 
ready explained, so far as it relates to the actual 
machinery of government itself, must be founded 
upon some principle relating to structure and 
operation with reference to the object and pur- 
pose in view. The whole discussion about the 
object and purpose of the state resolved itself 
after the close of the feudal period into an agree- 
ment that it was the general welfare of the com- 
munity. An equally diifficult question had been 
how was this general welfare to be secured. 
Bentham, whose "greatest happiness of the 
greatest number" meant pretty much the same 



28 THE DEMOCRATIC MISTAKE 

as the general welfare, inquired in what body 
can political power be lodged, whose interest 
will coincide with that of the body whose wel- 
fare is to be promoted? The answer was that 
no such body existed except the community at 
large. The human agents employed in the work 
of governing must be made responsible to the 
community by means of representative parlia- 
mentary institutions, and representative parlia- 
mentary institutions must rest on a suffrage of 
some sort. Bentham went farther than this, 
and said universal suffrage. Most of his con- 
temporaries contented themselves with such 
suffrage as then existed. 

Now, what I hope to show is, not that this 
view of the subject is false, for it marked a 
great advance in political theory, but that it is 
a partial view. What it leaves out of sight is 
that government is a very complex and delicate 
piece of machinery of which we have given a 
very imperfect account when we say that it all 
rests on this sort of responsibility to the people. 
The theory of political action which includes 
this and is necessary to its complete compre- 
hension and application is that the whole struct- 
ure and framework of every government con- 



GOVERNMENT BY DESIGN 29 

sciously carried on for the purposes of the state 
rests, and always must rest, on responsibility oj 
an infinite variety of species; that it is through 
responsibility of every variety and degree that 
government by design acts; that it is through 
an artificial use of motive in all directions 
to secure responsibility (that is, to secure the 
actual doing of the work of government) that 
government by design as we know it has at- 
tained its present importance and momen- 
tum. 

In other words, when Bentham reached his 
conclusion that responsibihty to the people 
through universal suffrage was to be the foun- 
dation of popular government, he meant merely 
that and nothing more. The equally important 
question, how far responsibility in ojffice was to 
be secured by other means, he did not broach. 
He had merely found out, for modern free states, 
the answer to the question — ^where is the sover- 
eign, and by what means can his will be ascer- 
tained ? That this answer could ever come to be 
used as a universal solvent for all questions in 
government, of responsibility in the perform- 
ance of their tasks by the agents of the sovereign, 
never entered his mind. 



30 THE DEMOCRATIC MISTAKE 

To sum up what has been said, It is of the 
essence of all conscious government that its 
structure is planned or contrived on some theory 
of operation, which again involves some theory 
as to the nature of man and the nature of gov- 
ernment. The pubHc business is made up of 
tasks judicial, legislative, and administrative, 
the performance of which is intrusted to selected 
agents, who are made answerable for them. The 
operation of designed or contrived government 
depends everywhere upon the principle of po- 
litical responsibihty to those who design or con- 
trive it. So far as this is successfully worked, 
the contrivance effects its objects and the gov- 
ernment attains its ends. It is as true of popular 
government as of the most rigid military des- 
potism, that its success depends throughout on 
effective responsibihty for the performance of 
tasks imposed. By what means is this respon- 
sibility to be attained ? Any theory of govern- 
ment which does not find a true answer to this 
question must be useless; and may, if acted 
upon, prove highly dangerous. Any inquiry 
into responsibility of this nature involves an 
inquiry into the ordinary operation of human 
motives in the discharge of pohtical functions. 



GOVERNMENT BY DESIGN 31 

This again must depend upon the view which we 
take of man and of government.^ 

^ At the outset I wish to guard against any idea that I am 
engaged in analyzing the nature of the tie between the citizen 
and the State — though it is hard to keep this entirely out of view. 
See James Bryce's interesting essay on "the force that brings and 
keeps men under governments," i. e., Obedience. "Studies in 
History and Jurisprudence," vol. II, p. i. 



LECTURE II 
RESPONSIBILITY 



RESPONSIBILITY 

In this lecture and the next I propose, first, 
to examine further what is meant by theories 
of the nature of man and of government, and 
to show the connection between ResponsibiHty 
— the force upon which all government depends 
— and the view we take of the nature of man and 
government; second, to examine some of the 
different ways in which Responsibility pervades 
government; and third, to examine some of the 
differences between that Responsibility to the 
people which is enforceable through the ballot, 
and other species naturally enforced by other 
means. 

Almost all the old writers on the subject of 
man's nature wrote unconsciously under the in- 
fluence of the mistaken idea that a systematic 
abstract knowledge of it as a whole was possible. 
One of the great stumbhng-blocks in the path 
of knowledge has always been the passion for 
definitions. It seems to take hold of the mind 
in the same way that the incHnation to attrib- 

35 



36 THE DEMOCRATIC MISTAKE 

ute phenomena to a single cause does, and gen- 
erations live and die a prey to it without know- 
ing the fact. When we learn that complex phe- 
nomena are generally attributable to a number 
of causes, and that vast abstractions and gen- 
eralizations cannot be defined, we have made a 
wonderful step forward in the ascertainment of 
truth. That man is a "featherless biped" is 
as true a definition as it ever was, but confuses 
rather than adds to our positive knowledge 
of him in any way. Simple definition failing, 
teachers of dogmatic religion and almost all the 
old writers on government began by assuming 
that they could estabhsh a conception of the 
nature of man as a whole. Some of the effects 
of these attempts may be seen in descriptions of 
the proclivities of man, usually much to his dis- 
credit. Thus, his nature is evil; he is homicidal, 
thievish, vain, cruel, perverse, gullible. The 
theory of man's innate depravity and corrup- 
tion is very convenient for those who wish them- 
selves to supply him with government, for no 
one can possibly be more in need of it than one 
innately depraved and corrupt; and it is indeed 
hard to find in this view any warrant for be- 
lieving that he will ever be able to govern him- 



RESPONSIBILITY 37 

self. Christians who have held to this view, if 
conservative, have often cut the knot by assum- 
ing a religious sanction for existing government 
as a necessity. Man is depraved, steeped in sin, 
and full of wickedness; therefore he needs a 
government to direct his steps and keep him in 
the right path. Such a government, vested in 
a particular class or dynasty, has actually been 
divinely provided for him. He ought to obey 
it, for what it ordains has a higher than human 
sanction. But this theory cannot outlive the 
behef in the system on which it is founded; it 
must disappear as soon as it is generally be- 
lieved that no one governs by divine right, and 
that government and the state are purely hu- 
man institutions. When it once clearly appears 
that man himself has introduced upon earth all 
that is good in human customs and laws as well 
as all that is bad, it is no longer possible to found 
our theory upon his total depravity, or even 
necessary selfishness, to save him from which 
divinely appointed guardians are necessary. 

The other side of the picture proves to be that 
this same depraved and corrupt creature is cap- 
able of acts of great wisdom and virtue, and 
displays qualities which give him at times a very 



38 THE DEMOCRATIC MISTAKE 

high opinion of himself. He is capable of great 
bravery, of great self-sacrifice; goes to the stake 
rather than profess a belief which he knows to 
be false, throws away his life for his friends or his 
children, often for the sake of saving a mere 
stranger; dies in battle gladly for his country, 
and, in fact, continually furnishes proof that he 
is, potentially at least, noble. 

I have collected almost at random a few in- 
stances of the singular diversity of opinion about 
the nature of man such as every one comes upon 
in looking into the subject, which may serve to 
illustrate this point. Mill — if I remember right, 
in his essay on Bentham — dwells on sympathy 
as one of man's marked traits, which no one dis- 
putes; but he seems to overlook almost entirely 
the fact that, owing to his appetites and pas- 
sions, antipathy may be at times as powerful, 
and when we reflect on the countless wars of re- 
ligion and ambition and greed, of which history 
is full, and in which millions of lives have been 
sacrificed, and into one of which he may, even 
now, at any moment be plunged; upon the 
countless judicial murders that he has com- 
mitted, and the violence of race prejudice and 
the massacres it has caused and now causes in 



RESPONSIBILITY 39 

our own day, we cannot but feel that any 
account of man which leaves antipathy and 
prejudice out will be at least as one-sided as one 
which forgets the power of sympathy. 

In Burke's "Essay on the Sublime and Beau- 
tiful," very popular in its day, Burke, who was 
to be the great defender of popular rights 
against tyranny, makes the statement that we 
*'have a degree of delight, and that no small 
one, in the real misfortunes and pains of others "; 
that we do not "shun such objects" and that 
"we must have a delight or pleasure of some 
species or other in contemplating objects of this 
kind." To this he adds that "terror is a passion 
which always produces delight when it does not 
press too close." Again, "There is no spectacle 
we so eagerly pursue as that of some uncom- 
mon and grievous calamity." And again, "the 
delight we have in such things hinders us from 
shunning scenes of misery." The instances he 
gives are the pleasure derived from reading of 
the history of the ruin of the State of Macedon, 
the destruction of Troy, the violent death of 
Cato, and the ruin of the great cause he ad- 
hered to. We may agree with his statement that 
a pleasure is derived from theatrical spectacles 



40 THE DEMOCRATIC MISTAKE 

of a tragic nature, or tragic narrative; but that 
we actually enjoy the suffering of others and 
linger with pleasure over the misery of our fel- 
lows, most of us would be inclined to deny with 
some indignation. 

Another illustration is afforded by the Decla- 
ration of Independence. Man is born free and 
equal with certain inalienable rights. This, on 
the other hand, is denied as a statement of 
neither scientific nor historic truth, and accord- 
ingly it has been furiously attacked by all anti- 
democratic writers. 

Sir James Stephen, in his book on "Liberty, 
Fraternity, and EquaHty," protests that man 
is at the bottom not fond of liberty or fraternity, 
and least of all equality, since his great aim in 
life is to enjoy the fruits of superior wealth, edu- 
cation, and position, an aim which is absolutely 
fatal to equality. What man really likes, he 
declares, is inequality. He loves to excel his 
fellows in wealth, honors, titles, power, and dis- 
tinction. 

Even if we confine our inquiry to our own day 
and generation we meet with the same confu- 
sion. Make out a list of a man's virtues and we 
are answered by a list of corresponding vices. 



RESPONSIBILITY 41 

Enumerate all the appetites, passions, and ob- 
jects of desire and aversion that we can think of, 
and we are immediately reminded of the im- 
possibility of predicting what the result of them 
in any given case will be. The very happiness 
which he pursues he throws away under the in- 
fluence of a stronger feeling. 

All this relates to the study of the nature of 
man as a permanent type; if we were to go into 
it historically and anthropologically, we should 
find ourselves in a worse maze, for we should 
learn that man's nature is not constant, but 
changes in process of development, so that it 
has been said that the lowest savage in the 
Australian bush is not as much above the anthro- 
poid ape as the most advanced specimen of 
civilized man is above him. And in one age he 
is habitually cruel, and in another humane; in 
one community a monogamist, in another a 
polygamist; in one period governed by unchang- 
ing custom, in another by a passion for competi- 
tion and gain. 

Mill observes on this subject that mankind is 
much more thoroughly agreed that all men are 
of one nature than as to what that nature is. 
But for purposes of government it seems to be 



42 THE DEMOCRATIC MISTAKE 

absolutely necessary that we have some theory 
as to this common nature, which will at any 
rate free us from the difficulty of doing what 
we never can do by definition or synthesis. We 
are not on solid ground if we can find out noth- 
ing more than that man is a creature of contra- 
dictions; that he is attracted by ideals which 
are constantly present; that he is attracted by 
temptations which are inherent in his nature, 
toward evil and deterioration; that he is also 
capable of a mental state of indiflFerence; that 
he is both evil and good, both perverse and 
docile, both selfish and unselfish, devoted to 
self-love, and yet capable of the highest eff*orts 
of altruism. If you will examine La Rochefou- 
cauld's Maxims, you will find that he makes the 
primum mobile of human nature to be self-love; 
if this means only that our happiness centres in 
ourselves, since we do not feel outside ourselves, 
I suppose it is undeniable; it cannot mean that 
we act solely for selfish ends. 

Another cause which has always retarded the 
acceptance of a positive theory of political ac- 
tion — down to our times in fact — ^was an anal- 
ogous mistake about the nature of government. 
The problems of government were first attacked 



RESPONSIBILITY 43 

as a whole. What is the state? What is our 
highest idea of a state? Plato and Aristotle 
were the first to break this whole up by showing 
that it manifested itself under three great forms. 
When the study of government was revived 
after the Middle Ages, the "three forms" of 
government were fastened upon, not as a mat- 
ter of observation in Greek Constitutions, but 
as a fundamental analysis of all government. 
If there were only three forms of government, 
obviously one must be the best, and so a 
long battle began between the rival forms, 
which lasted down to the time of Grote's brill- 
iant vindication of Grecian Democracy against 
Mitford. This controversy failed to settle the 
matter because in it again the three forms. 
Monarchy, Aristocracy, and Democracy, were 
treated as if they really represented three prin- 
ciples from which the whole condition of the 
state could be deduced, instead of being three 
different sources of sovereign power, which cor- 
responded to different sets of circumstances in 
different states. Pope, a rationalist, cut the 
knot by saying: 

For forms of Government let fools contest; 
That which is best administered is best. 



44 THE DEMOCRATIC MISTAKE 

Blackstone gives a solution of the puzzle popular 
in his day when, quoting Cicero in his support, 
he says that Englishmen need not trouble them- 
selves so much about it; each of the three forms 
had its advantages, while England had evidently 
the best possible government in the world, be- 
cause in her constitution she not only had all 
three, — Monarchy, Aristocracy, and Democ- 
racy, — but better than that, each form was ex- 
actly balanced by the other two, so that neither 
could ruin either of the other two. 

Nobody who has not studied the subject with 
care is apt to recall how full all literature is of 
futile attempts to make deductions from the 
nature of man and the body politic as a whole, 
with the aid of metaphysical and religious specu- 
lation and of metaphor and analogy, and to 
dogmatize upon the nature of government and, 
as I said in my last lecture, how very little posi-^ 
tive reasoning is to be found about either except 
within the last hundred and fifty years. 

For instance, a favorite parallel between man 
and the state has been greatly relied on in lieu 
of argument. Man is born, grows to maturity, 
grows old and feeble, and finally dies. So do 
states. Hence, it is argued that there is a neces- 



RESPONSIBILITY 45 

sary period of life for states and that states must 
die. Now that there is an eternal parallel be- 
tween man and the state is true; it would be 
strange if there were not, since the community 
is made up of men — but it is only an analogy. 
For human beings there is a fixed period of life, 
and death comes from inevitable physical causes. 
We know within a few years what the average 
length of a man's life is and very nearly how 
long he can live. Even Metchnikoff does not 
imagine that we shall ever by the most improved 
regimen live more than one hundred and fifty 
or two hundred years. But there is no physical 
limit to the life of states any more than to that 
of any incorporated body. The Roman empire 
lasted for centuries. The Enghsh state has 
lasted for centuries, and may last for centuries 
more. There is no period fixed by nature. A 
state may come to an end through internal cor- 
ruption; but it generally comes to an end by the 
violence of its neighbors. Again, man is born of 
woman by a process which we call reproduction 
of species; the birth of states is due to chance, to 
force, and to design. The point of absolute dis- 
similarity lies in the fact that one sort of life is in- 
dividual, the other non-individual and corporate. 



46 THE DEMOCRATIC MISTAKE 

What is government? What is its origin? 
What is its proper sphere or province? From 
Plato to Jefferson, as already explained, there 
is a long line of brilliant investigators of these 
questions who try to answer them by a "priori 
means, who seem at times to throw a flood of 
light upon them, but who do not advance mat- 
ters. "The Republic" is to-day almost as enter- 
taining a book as when it was written, but it is 
no political text-book. Its principles of reason- 
ing are to us in great measure false and illogical. 
The line of distinction between clear ideas and 
true ideas was not yet perceived. Rousseau's 
social contract has become a recognized illus- 
tration of a gratuitous assumption. The whole 
fabric of definitions and deductions has been 
superseded by the positive view that govern- 
ment is a complex institution which cannot be 
defined; that its origin can only be investigated 
by the historical path, and that its sphere can- 
not be laid down abstractly. Of all the Utopias 
invented by man not a single one seems to have 
a secure hold upon the popular fancy except 
that of Socialism, a dream which for a variety 
of reasons is peculiarly attractive to democratic 
communities. But the process by which Utopias 



RESPONSIBILITY 47 

are manufactured is as well understood as the 
natural history of any intellectual figment. It 
derives its life from the tendency of the mind 
to give a causative force to an ideal. First take 
an Ideal — Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, and 
Peace are always those which recur to the mind, 
because they are beautiful — personify it, and 
endow it with what power is needed, and you 
can make any Utopia you please. The thousand 
years of peace is one of the oldest, although in 
practice fifty years of peace seems to be as long 
as human nature generally can endure the strain; 
the Millennium easily goes out of fashion. 

Man, Aristotle says, is a political animal; and 
this differs from anything said before in being a 
piece of accurate description which means that 
he is capable, at a certain stage of his develop- 
ment, of producing what is called a state. There 
is no such thing as abstract government or an 
abstract state, any more than there is an ab- 
stract man, and consequently the varieties of 
states are almost infinite. Its form may be 
monarchical, or aristocratic, or democratic, or a 
mixture of the three. It may be single or federal. 
It may be large or small. It may have all sorts 



48 THE DEMOCRATIC MISTAKE 

of objects, and in its sphere may include any 
thing. Sparta, one of the earliest specimens of a 
SociaUstic state, was a camp. Public meals, as 
an incident of citizenship, were a widely spread 
institution in Greece. It may have a feudal 
organization as in the Middle Ages; it may 
be mihtary like Rome, or primarily industrial, 
Hke England and the United States. It may, 
like Russia, be very intolerant of individual free- 
dom, or it may cultivate individual initiative. 
It may have a very limited suffrage, or a wide 
one; it may have an imperial head, or a parHa- 
mentary system combined with a royal execu- 
tive, like England; or it may have a presidential 
system, like the United States. Under all cir- 
cumstances, however, the following are among 
the features it usually exhibits. 

It includes the idea of man and a body politic, 
subjection or citizenship and allegiance, and re- 
sponsibility to a head in control of the whole, 
the power to direct and change the whole thing 
being lodged in this head. This institution is 
so contrived as to do for man consciously 
things which man cannot do for himself without 
it. It gives him in his pursuit of various objects 
of desire security against external and internal 



RESPONSIBILITY 49 

dangers. It may furnish him with other things; 
for instance, it has furnished him with a calen- 
dar, with education, with rehgion, and it can 
furnish him with food, clothing, and all the ne- 
cessities of Hfe; that is, it may directly furnish 
him with objects of desire, or it may secure him 
in the pursuit of these objects. It enforces 
promises, and redresses the wrongs done by his 
neighbor, or prevents them (the whole body of 
the civil law). It furnishes him with a police 
and with soldiers and sailors for defence exter- 
nally. Leaving out of view foreigners, it pro- 
vides all this for its citizens living within a def- 
inite boundary. It always acts through human 
agents, and all its powers and functions may be 
united in the hands of a single person. In this 
case, the abstraction which we know as sover- 
eignty becomes indistinguishable from the in- 
dividual who is called the sovereign. Under 
ordinary circumstances, an absolute sovereign 
is obliged to delegate most of his power among 
various agents, so that there is even here a dis- 
tribution of powers; and a classification of them 
becomes possible. In the opposite case, of the 
supreme power being lodged in the body of the 
community, all the ideas connected with it are 



50 THE DEMOCRATIC MISTAKE 

vastly more complicated. The body politic 
then becomes very like an ordinary corporation. 
Like any other corporation, its powers are 
exercised by agents, while the activity of the 
sovereign is mainly confined to selecting those 
who are to so exercise its powers, or to de- 
ciding questions submitted to it by itself or its 
own agents. 

Looking at the matter in this way, we need 
not for our purposes trouble ourselves about the 
historical origin of government. This really 
concerns us little more than the origin of life. 
Probably governments were of diverse origin. 
At any rate, the origin of almost all of them is 
lost in the night of time. All that is necessary 
for us to consider is that we find in a vast num- 
ber of actually existing governments the feat- 
ures mentioned; and that when a state is cre- 
ated, the contrivance, or institution, is super- 
imposed upon the habits and customs of the 
community already existing and handed down 
from father to son for generations. Existing 
customs are presupposed in governments; gov- 
ernment is itself an artificial institution based 
in great measure on custom; and we should add 
to our collection of fundamental facts that habit 



RESPONSIBILITY 51 

and custom in man are coeval with his existence, 
are much older than either law or government, 
and are capable of transmission, conscious or 
unconscious, from generation to generation. 
Nor can we leave out of view morality or re- 
ligion, but into the origin of these again it is 
not necessary for us to inquire. We take the 
moral system and reHgion of a state as a fact. 

In all states, even in self-governing communi- 
ties, government is carried on by a minority 
of the whole — with us the body of adult men. 
And it is in the hands of a still smaller number 
that poHtical power is actually from day to day 
lodged. The popular sovereign holds his power 
ordinarily in reserve. The work of government 
he intrusts to subordinates. This fact, in the 
discussion of these matters, seems to have been 
resented, and its existence is often denied by 
advocates of the democratic form. In Tammany 
Hall, in which one man rules supreme, and in 
which he selects every candidate for office, it 
is annually pretended by him and his followers 
that he does not know in advance what "the 
slate" is going to be until the convention has 
deliberated upon it. This pretence, however, 
is the tribute which the machine pays to democ- 



52 THE DEMOCRATIC MISTAKE 

racy. But the fact can hardly be disputed. It 
corresponds with the fact that a small number 
lead in science, invention, the arts, etc., in which 
case it is not questioned, probably because they 
do not attempt to govern. The initiative in 
every direction generally comes from one or a 
small number. 

Now, taking all of this for granted, the only 
principle of action on which the sovereign — one, 
or few, or many — can rely to get his work done 
is that invoked by such widely different writers 
as Bentham and Hamilton — Responsibility. It 
is invoked by these two writers for different, 
though related, purposes. Bentham, whose ob- 
ject was to answer the question, by what means 
are the abuses of political power to be held in 
check? answers it by saying through responsi- 
biHty to the only body of persons whose interest 
accords with the welfare of the community and 
good government; i, e., the majority of the 
community through the ballot. Hamilton, in 
the Federalist, relies upon it, though he does not 
perhaps expound it, as the mainspring of gov- 
ernment itself. The idea of legal responsibiHty 
is a commonplace. It has been studied for cen- 
turies. That of political responsibility, of which 



RESPONSIBILITY 53 

legal responsibility is a branch, had been, before 
the publication of the Federalist, hardly written 
about at all. 

So far as the government of a state is a human 
contrivance and based on man's being a political 
animal, it implies, as has been stated, that there 
are always those who govern and those who 
are governed, for certain political ends. That 
in a democracy those who govern are also gov- 
erned does not matter. The work of govern- 
ment from day to day is still done by a few. 
Neither a popular sovereign, nor a sovereign who 
is a single human being, governs without employ- 
ing agents, and the relation between these agents 
and the sovereign we describe as one of respon- 
sibility. Those who actually discharge the func- 
tions of government, whether as judges, legis- 
lators, governors, sheriffs, or postmasters, or 
tree-wardens, are responsible either directly to 
the sovereign or to some representative of the 
sovereign, who derives his powers from the 
sovereign. This responsibility is partly ethical, 
because it arises out of the relation itself. We 
say that any one who undertakes the perform- 
ance of a duty is morally bound to the perform- 
ance of it. It may also be religious. Where a 



54 THE DEMOCRATIC MISTAKE 

state appoints priests the appointee no doubt 
feels his poHtical accountability re-enforced by 
that to a higher power. But poHtical responsi- 
bility in itself is something different from and 
additional to all this. It means that the govern- 
ment itself imposes on the agent himself a re- 
sponsibility to itself, which is binding, apart from 
any moral or religious accountability that there 
may be. That man is able to secure for the 
state and willing to accept toward the state this 
kind of responsibility is what makes govern- 
ment possible; without it there could be none. 
Responsibility, then, may be dissociated in the 
mind from questions of habit, or customs, or 
opinions, or sentiments. These are matters of 
growth, debate, conviction, and feeling. By 
those who undertake, whether of their own ac- 
cord or by the invitation of others, to admin- 
ister government, all these are found, it may be 
said, "in place." Government takes them for 
granted. It may try to modify them in its own 
interest; but whether it does this or not, its 
operation, relating solely to the functions of the 
government and the tasks it undertakes, may 
be distinguished from them. When Poland was 
divided among its more powerful neighbors, 



RESPONSIBILITY 55 

they found among its habits a common language 
dear to the inhabitants. When one of them 
made up his mind to suppress this language 
within the part of Poland taken by him, he took 
that repulsive task within the scope of the sphere 
or province of government; but the means by 
which he undertook to suppress it were human 
agents. These agents were instructed to sup- 
plant one language with another, and because 
they could be made responsible in a variety of 
ways the work was more or less thoroughly 
done. 

When the South was conquered by the North 
and the Union restored, the suffrage was given 
to the blacks, and the occupation of the South 
by troops and a variety of other agents was 
continued for the purpose of securing the exer- 
cise of the right. Those in control were held 
responsible for the result, and accordingly, so 
long as this system was kept up, political power 
in the several States was practically vested in 
the negroes. This was totally contrary to the 
habits of the two races, and for the time being 
suppressed them; but when the troops were 
withdrawn this regime came to an end, the race 
habits reasserted themselves, and the negro su- 



56 THE DEMOCRATIC MISTAKE 

premacy disappeared. This is a perfect instance 
of what I mean when I say that poHtical respon- 
sibility may be a contrivance for designed ends 
quite different from a natural growth, such as 
a custom. 

Persecution and massacre have been used from 
the earliest times, and are still used by govern- 
ments called civilized, to accomplish political 
objects. Depopulation and extermination of 
disagreeable neighbors were once thought to be 
within the legitimate "sphere of government." 
These ends are accomplished generally through 
the military arm of the state, on the pretext of 
self-defence or self-protection. No better in- 
stance could be given of responsibility. The 
agents employed are called upon to destroy the 
lives and property of unarmed and defenceless 
people with whom they have no quarrel. That 
men can always be found to do this horrible 
work is a strong illustration of the tremendous 
force of the principle of political responsibility 
pushed to its logical extreme. It is not, as Lord 
Brougham ludicrously pretended, the lawyer 
who may be called upon by his responsibility to 
his client to ruin everything that is worth living 
for, but the soldier, who is made responsible for 



RESPONSIBILITY 57 

absolute obedience to the orders of his superior, 
no matter how shocking the consequences. But 
the military function of the state is one of the 
oldest and most universal among men. The 
principle of military responsibility is absolute 
obedience. 

The Ship of State used to be a favorite figure. 
Sir John Seeley has pointed out that our concep- 
tion of government in general certainly ought to 
include that of a vessel; and as an illustration 
of responsibihty analogous to that in the political 
world nothing could be better. What is it that 
in the last resort the captain falls back upon to 
maintain that discipKne without which the ship 
and everybody on board would be in constant 
peril? An iron responsibihty to him, which 
means that the extreme penalty is death. We 
are so accustomed to this that we do not think 
of it, but in earlier times when sea-going was 
chiefly coastwise, the ship's company on the 
iEgean did not recognize any such necessity; 
their nautical habits led them to look upon a 
voyage as a venture in which every one in case 
of danger should have his say. The absolute 
power of the captain and absolute responsibility 
of the officers and crew are an artificial con- 



58 THE DEMOCRATIC MISTAKE 

trivance and the mature invention of better 
seamen. 

Responsibility, then, I take to be the funda- 
mental spring of everything in government. 
The success of its employment is a test of civ- 
ilization. It exists in a family, it exists in a 
tribe, and a fortiori, it exists in a state, i. e,, in 
a community living within a separate territory, 
bound together by common laws, subject to a 
common sovereign. It is the use of an artificial 
system of responsibility by the state with which 
we have to do, and especially by the state under 
a popular form of government. You will observe 
that I am at any rate more modest in my de- 
mands upon your assent than most writers on 
this subject. For I ask you to admit, what 
has been generally conceded since Aristotle's 
time, that man is a political or state-making 
animal; and also that he effects political ob- 
jects through use of an observed fact behind 
which we cannot go, viz., that one man can in- 
duce another to undertake and become responsi- 
ble for the performance of political tasks. What 
the means employed are does not, at this stage 
of our inquiry, matter. It may be persuasion, 
it may be force, it may be some tie of blood or 



RESPONSIBILITY 59 

habit, it may be simply by furnishing him with 
the means of support; it may be by place, rank, 
honors, and promotion. Whatever it is, it re- 
sults in responsibility; that is, answerability, 
and not answerability to God or the moral law 
(though these may coexist with it), but political 
answerability. What we mean by political ends 
we need not define, because every state and 
every age gives them a more elastic or more 
restricted meaning. Whatever they are, the 
means by which responsibiHty for public work 
is secured are such as we have described. To 
suppose that responsibility in a free government 
is merely coextensive with responsibility to the 
electorate through the ballot is to introduce 
confusion into the subject. 

Responsibility, then, is the root of the power 
of the state; it is a force which cannot act except 
through human motive; and it is clear that the 
persons acted upon must be agents, mediate or 
immediate, of the sovereign; and to verify this, 
so far as it concerns our own government, you 
have only to look into the constitution and 
statutes of any American state. These agents 
must discharge some function, and for that 
purpose have the requisite power; that is, they 



6o THE DEMOCRATIC MISTAKE 

must be judges, representatives, senators, gov- 
ernors, assessors, selectmen; and the function 
is prescribed for them by the constitution and 
laws adopted by the sovereign or its agents. 
They must consequently be appointed or elected 
to their offices, which they must hold by a 
longer or shorter tenure, and they must either 
discharge their duties gratuitously, or they must 
be recompensed by the state. Their tenure may 
be for life, for good behavior, for a limited term; 
or during the pleasure of the sovereign; it might 
be, as elsewhere, hereditary. 

When we talk of these agents being vested 
with power, what is meant is that, as the sover- 
eign is conceived of as the source of all power, he 
might discharge the function without resorting 
to agents. Early kings, for instance, were also 
judges and commanders in chief. In Athens 
the whole body of citizens tried cases. When 
judicial power is delegated to agents, we con- 
ceive of the courts having for the time the 
whole judicial power which the sovereign peo- 
ple possess or the king possesses. 

When we talk about motives being acted upon, 
we are obliged to return to what we observed 
about man, and insist that there are constant 



RESPONSIBILITY 6i 

motives which can be acted upon so as to result 
in poHtical responsibihty. We find as a matter 
of fact that among the motives always reHed 
upon as constant have been the necessity of 
support, the desire for power, the dread of 
"censure" or opinion, or of punishment, and 
the love of approval, rank, honor, and reward. 
That is, in addition to all sorts of moral and 
religious motives, these are the motives com- 
monly appealed to to secure responsibility. And 
they have been found sufficient. It is as well 
estabhshed as any fact can be that by resorting 
to this system all the governments in the world 
have been estabhshed, and are in operation. 

It may be worth while to observe that this 
shows one respect in which the life of the body 
pohtic is analogous to that of the natural man. 
Man is sovereign over his own affairs, as the 
state is sovereign over him; he himself is under 
a moral responsibility, which means an account- 
ability for his acts for violations of what we call 
the moral order of the universe. This moral 
order operates through a system of rewards and 
punishments, i. e,, through motives, and, if we 
go one step farther and introduce a rehgious 
sovereign, we are forced to admit that he too 



62 THE DEMOCRATIC MISTAKE 

governs the world exactly as an earthly sovereign 
does, through the principle of responsibility. 

Now, all this theory runs by implication 
through the pages of the Federalist, and it is 
the theory on which the entire framework of 
the federal constitution is founded. There is 
in it no trace, so far as I can see, of any belief 
in blind forces, nor any resemblance to mechan- 
ics. It is all design of the highest kind, and de- 
sign resting upon just that knowledge of the 
usual operation of human motive which enables 
us to make use of and be of use to our fellows 
in every other direction, and the final mastery 
of which is attributed by religion to God. 

The means, then, by which responsibihty is 
secured must vary with time, race, and circum- 
stances, but is always through some motive or 
motives the operation of which is so uniform 
that we are justified in assuming it to be con- 
stant. In primitive times two such motives are 
the rehgious bond and the tie of blood, and it is 
owing to the strength of the former that we find 
oaths so uniformly used to bind the conscience 
of those who exercise office; the very fact that 
the King was the Lord's anointed made mal- 
feasance in acting for him a kind of sacrilege. 



RESPONSIBILITY 63 

We still administer an oath of office, but in 
modern times we have lost the belief that this 
is of the essence of the matter, and allow the 
incumbent, if he has conscientious scruples 
against an oath, to make an affirmation — a pro- 
ceeding which, until comparatively recent times, 
would have seemed either futile or wrong. The 
tie of blood which runs through all early tribal 
government had a force that we know nothing 
of. In tribal government the sympathy of 
kindred blood, even when it was a pure as- 
sumption, was a motive which could be safely 
appealed to, to secure responsibility. 

In modern communities these motives have 
lost their primitive strength, and may be said 
to be at their weakest in modern democratic 
communities. Accordingly, in the self-govern- 
ment of such communities, we usually see a 
variety of motives appealed to in the hope that 
some may prove efficacious. But these always 
include the constant motives above referred 
to, i. e., the necessity of support; the desire for 
power; the dread of "censure" or opinion, 
or of punishment; and the love of approval, 
rank, honor, and reward. Without abandon- 
ing the oath of office, which is still admin- 



64 THE DEMOCRATIC MISTAKE 

istered to all who will take it, we add, in case 
of many offices, a pecuniary bond, the penalty 
of which appeals to the dislike of pecuniary 
loss; we assure the agent's support, during 
the performance of the duties of the office, by 
a salary, or fees, and make the tenure of it suf- 
ficiently long at least to induce the incumbent 
to accept it; encourage his fidelity with the 
hope of advancement, and reward it with pro- 
motion, and often in old age and disability with 
a pension, and in the case of failure or wrong- 
doing attach the penalties of summary removal 
or removal by impeachment or other legal 
means. For the religious bond and that of 
blood, our substitute is the moral, social, and 
patriotic bond, which is in some cases, and at 
some times, weaker, at others stronger, but 
which cannot compare in constant strength with 
some of the others just mentioned. Socialists, 
it may be observed, do not agree to this. They 
hold that responsibility for the operation of the 
new sort of government they propose, whose 
main function will be to correct the errors intro- 
duced into human society by the nature of man, 
can be secured through the ordinary operation 
of moral, social, and patriotic motives; that is, 



RESPONSIBILITY 65 

through what is called sympathy. One objec- 
tion to this solution of the matter, as already 
remarked, is that, as far as our observation and 
knowledge goes, antipathy at times is apt to 
be quite as powerful a force as sympathy. 

I think, therefore, that a fair statement of the 
case, so far as it concerns free government, is 
that to secure responsibility in office we appeal 
to all the motives which can presumably come 
to our aid, but primarily to hope and fear of 
advantage or detriment of some kind. Among 
the former are emoluments, office, promotion, 
pensions, the good opinion of neighbors and 
friends, and, in exceptional cases, distinction and 
fame; among the latter are pecuniary loss, loss 
of reputation, disgrace, and deprivation of office. 
But to these are added the whole force, whatever 
it may be, of the obligations of religion and mo- 
rality, of nationality, of patriotism, so far as we 
can make use of them. 

I have said very little about economic law, 
because the mere mention of it nowadays seems 
to excite indignation; but people who are act- 
ually engaged in government always have it 
forced upon their attention. What we call the 
greed for office is closely connected with the 



66 THE DEMOCRATIC MISTAKE 

one great economic fact which can never be 
evaded — that to Hve, man must eat. Whatever 
other motive man calls in to aid him in getting 
political work done, the most authoritative 
writers, no less than the common experience of 
mankind, enforce the conclusion that means of 
daily support sufficient to insure the continu- 
ance of life cannot be overlooked. 

ResponsibiHty may be lodged, in theory, in 
certain hands, in fact, in other hands. The per- 
son made responsible for power intrusted to 
him may be one person, or responsibility may 
be devolved upon a few persons, or upon a large 
number of persons, and vice versa. It may be 
of different species or varieties. It may act 
through diflFerent motives. Whether or no 
these finally all come under the heads of fear 
and hope, even fear and hope act in an infinite 
number of different ways. In the most primi- 
tive forms of government, fear of life and limb 
is the motive which most readily suggests it- 
self; this fact it is which is at the bottom of 
Montesquieu's generalization that the principle 
of despotism is fear. PoHtical responsibility 
through fear of death is always highly attrac- 
tive to tyrants, and is still resorted to wherever 



RESPONSIBILITY 67 

the traditions of tyranny survive. In Russia 
to-day, a general engaged in war may find his 
life staked for him by the government on the 
result; a hundred years ago the idea of death 
as a legitimate and usual form of poHtical 
responsibiHty was by no means unfamiliar. 
That ordinary official responsibility should take 
this form is to us a grotesque idea; but in 
France during the Revolution an orator is 
mentioned by Mr. Lowell as having made a 
speech in favor of ministerial responsibility, of 
which the conclusion was, "and by responsi- 
biHty I mean death." In arbitrary govern- 
ments failure in office is readily confounded with 
treason; to substitute for death exile and con- 
fiscation is an act of leniency. In highly civil- 
ized governments, although theoretically pun- 
ishment by deprivation of office is relied on to 
enforce the responsibility of the executive, it is 
rarely resorted to, partly because it is cumbrous, 
and partly because a far more delicate form of 
responsibility has been found effective — that of 
** censure." The desire for good-will and ap- 
proval often combines with the hope of contin- 
uance in office. 
A curious feature of poHtical responsibiHty 



68 THE DEMOCRATIC MISTAKE 

is that it continually tends to shift its situs, to 
disappear in one place and reappear in another; 
and this is a necessary consequence of the fact 
that in any community, however apparently 
stable or carefully designed the government, 
new centres of political power are always (in the 
inevitable process of social change) in process 
of development. The best-known illustration 
of this is found in England. Down to compara- 
tively recent times English ministers were re- 
sponsible to the Crown, very much as ministers 
are to-day in Germany. As they were appointed 
by the Crown, and were removable by the 
Crown, there seemed no alternative. But forty 
years ago it was pointed out by Bagehot that 
they had become really responsible to the party 
majority for the time being in the House of 
Commons, and had become very like a committee 
of the House of Commons. The responsibility 
to the Crown had become nominal, and the 
centre of power had changed. Unsuspected for 
a long time, this had become a constitutional 
fact. Down to 1832, owing to the condition of 
the electorate, the House of Commons was a 
feeble body in comparison with the Crown, but 
when the powerful and rich middle class were 



RESPONSIBILITY 69 

admitted to the suffrage their representatives 
encroached upon the powers of the Crown by 
compelUng the ministry to become answerable 
to them. But, if you will examine Mr. Lowell's 
interesting study of the whole subject, you will 
see that a further change seems to be taking 
place now, by which ministers are becoming 
more or less directly responsible to the electorate 
so that they are disposed to require as authority 
for new measures a democratic mandate. The 
principle of responsibility remains; if they fail, 
they go out of oiEce. 

All modern writers on government were until 
recently agreed that what made popular govern- 
ment possible in the large free states of the 
modern world was the principle of representa- 
tion; that direct democracy over enormous 
areas was impossible. Representation of pop- 
ular bodies is based on responsibility. "Re- 
sponsibility to the People" is its essence. But 
representation is only a form of delegation 
adapted to free institutions; the delegation of 
power under some species of responsibility for 
its exercise is as old as the world. When a dis- 
trict elects a representative to Congress for two 
years, it does, through the machinery of the 



70 THE DEMOCRATIC MISTAKE 

ballot, something which, at this point, resembles 
what the Emperor of Russia does when he sends 
an agent to govern a province. It delegates 
power to be executed at a distance. In the one 
case power is delegated by a single person; in 
the other by an electorate, but in either case it 
is a delegation of power to be used at a distance 
by an agent who is to answer for what he has 
done. There is a further difference — that the 
representative is elected for a definite time — 
but this is not essential. He might be elected 
during good behavior, and the contrivance now 
introduced for getting rid of representatives 
unsatisfactory to their constituents, called the 
Recall, is a popular device for perfecting re- 
sponsibility to the source of power. To the 
Emperor it is not a device. He recalls his agent 
by inherited right. 

The operation, then, of the representative 
system is founded on the old principle of dele- 
gation and responsibiHty. When we say that 
a member of Congress is responsible to his con- 
stituents, we mean that he must go back and ac- 
count to them for what he has done, in which 
case they may re-elect him, select him for some 
higher office, or pass him over. 



RESPONSIBILITY 71 

It was owing to our theory of responsibility 
that the old executive right of "proroguing" 
the legislature was abandoned in this country. 
If Congress is responsible to the People, the 
executive would usurp their prerogative in pro- 
^ roguing it. A popular prorogation could only 
be effected by a vote of the people themselves 
and for other reasons was not thought advis- 
able. The recall of a legislator would be a pro- 
rogation of a single representative by his electors; 
and might be applied to the whole body at 
once, in which case it would be a prorogation by 
the People instead of by the Crown. 

Perhaps a clearer view of artificial political 
responsibility may be obtained by contrasting 
it with the ancillary system which is always at 
its right hand in every civilized government — 
that of legal responsibility. The civil and crim- 
inal responsibility of the citizen or subject in a 
court of law for his acts and omissions rests 
upon principles analogous to the responsibility 
in the political field of those intrusted with 
power for the discharge of their political task. 
One of the simplest and earliest forms of legal 
responsibility is simple punishment for crime, 
and this may take every form of which punish- 



72' THE DEMOCRATIC MISTAKE 

ment is capable; the cruelest physical tortures 
and the extreme agony inflicted through super- 
stitious terror are equally utilized by primitive 
law. At the other extreme we have in our age 
the most delicate skill and enlightened zeal de- 
voted, not to punishment, but to the transfor- 
mation of the potential criminal into what we 
call a responsible citizen, a process the most 
humane known to civilization, by which we not 
merely make use of, but actually create, respon- 
sibiHty in the mind and soul of man. Civil re- 
sponsibility before the law, in early times, tak- 
ing generally the crude form of pecuniary loss, 
advances to a much higher level in combining 
with this the prevention of wrong; but preven- 
tive justice is itself based on a summary re- 
sponsibility to the courts — that responsibility of 
which we have heard so much of late, and 
without which the administration of justice 
would be a hollow mockery. It is through 
poHtical responsibility that this legal responsibil- 
ity is made possible. The political agency which 
makes it possible is courts of justice. It is the 
courts which are responsible for the administra- 
tion of justice, and whether this responsibility 
is discharged honestly and efficiently depends 



RESPONSIBILITY 73 

entirely on the means taken by the political 
head — king, emperor, parliament, or sovereign 
people — to contrive a sound system of judicial 
responsibihty. 

Responsibility in office is merely one illustra- 
tion of the general principle of responsibility 
extending through the whole body politic, and 
on its nature and operation light may be thrown 
from almost any side. One of the best and 
most common illustrations is that afforded by 
military discipline. Responsibility here means 
primitive unquestioning obedience. As already 
mentioned, governments have been from the 
earliest times always able to obtain a constant 
supply of troops and officers, to hold them abso- 
lutely accountable for disobedience of orders, 
partly through the dread of punishment, partly 
through the hope of reward, partly through the 
mere guarantee of the means of subsistence. 
This is a good illustration of the principle, be- 
cause it shows at the same time the foundation 
on which the principle rests, the extraordinary 
readiness of man to be taught and trained for 
use by the state. It used to be thought that 
the only way to secure a constant supply of 
troops was to pander to their worst passions, 



74 THE DEMOCRATIC MISTAKE 

and give them through booty, sack, and ransom 
the means of gratifying these. The maxim, 
"The soldier must have his reward," said to 
have been Tilly's answer when begged for some 
show of clemency after the three days' sack of 
Magdeburg, has been in our time abandoned; a 
higher and more humane system of responsibil- 
ity has been established. The modern officer's 
lot is in the main very dull and monotonous; 
he and the soldiers under him submit to drill 
and drudgery, which to a civilian seems odious, 
with the readiness of a policeman. To get their 
task performed by either, we cease to appeal to 
base motives and appetites, and get the work 
better done. 

The fire service is even a still more remarkable 
instance. Those who enHst in this service do so 
for scanty pay, and the ordinary performance 
of their duty involves constant exposure to 
death, and possible injuries even worse than 
death. But paid firemen and their officers are 
willing to assume the responsibility for what in 
any one else would be heroic self-sacrifice for 
slight reward, and submit to a rigorous and 
almost military discipline. In this case the 
motive among others appealed to seems to be 



RESPONSIBILITY 75 

in part a very human and universal one — the 
love of excitement; and in part a very noble 
one — the desire to go to the help of a fellow- 
creature in distress and danger. 

Party responsibility is a quasi corporate re- 
sponsibility in the whole party, which operates 
by depriving its managers of power, i. e., office, 
when they no longer have the confidence and 
support of the electorate. This sort of respon- 
sibihty has played a most important part in the 
history of free government, as it is a direct re- 
sponsibiHty to the electorate. It was through 
party responsibility that the Federalists were 
driven out by the Republicans, and the Whigs 
by the Democrats, and these in turn by the 
present Republican party. At present we often 
seem to be living in a country in which there is 
no national party responsibility, there being 
only one party; the fact is constantly deplored 
by the press for very good reason. A party 
is a political combination for the attainment of 
definite ends. Unless there is another party 
with a reasonable hope of persuading the elec- 
torate of the utility of an opposed policy, the 
party in possession may remain in power so 
long as to make it difficult for it ever to be dis- 



76 THE DEMOCRATIC MISTAKE 

lodged. Even under the Caesars there was a sort 
of opposition, but it was not the opposition of 
a party; the party in power had ceased to be re- 
sponsible because it could not be turned out. 
Any one who wishes to see what happens when, 
in a country once free, there is no longer a strug- 
gle between two parties for the possession of 
power, should read Gaston Boissier's "TOppo- 
sition sous les Cesars"; the author had seen the 
same thing in his own day; having been a sub- 
ject of the third Napoleon. 

Without taking into view party responsibility, 
what is meant by artificial political responsibil- 
ity is, as already explained, the use of motive in 
those intrusted with power to do the will of the 
poHtical head, so as to make them answerable. 
To provide for it in a given case, it is necessary 
to know all the factors in the problem. It does 
not work, any more than any other political 
force, in a moral vacuum. The great difficulty 
which all governments have had in dealing suc- 
cessfully with corporations is a by-word. Cor- 
porations are not office-holders, but creatures 
of the state; they are vested by the state with 
a part of its power for certain ends. A railroad 
or an industrial corporation is not very Hke a 



RESPONSIBILITY 77 

church, but its power has the same potentiality 
of growth; and consequently the state makes it 
responsible in a variety of ways; it may for- 
feit its charter, its officers may be fined and im- 
prisoned; its discharge of its functions may be 
supervised by the state; it may be broken up 
into smaller corporations; in addition to all 
this, there is the ordinary legal responsibility 
for damage and wrong. The path of history is 
strewn with wrecks of such bodies which, in 
their struggle to become unaccountable, have 
been destroyed by the state. Combinations of 
a dangerous character may not be corporations 
at all; whatever form they take, the struggle 
is, on the one hand, to assert a supremacy above 
the state; on the other, to establish some sort 
of responsibility. A curious instance in our own 
time is the struggle between the state and the 
trade unions. The essence of these unions is 
that they are unincorporated. Their members 
are under a theoretic responsibility, for instance, 
to the sheriff and his posse; this is, however, 
in this country, often of Httle value, as the body 
of citizens may easily sympathize with the ad- 
herents of the union. The result was at first 
a system of violence and intimidation by means 



78 THE DEMOCRATIC MISTAKE 

of which unions were able to terrorize whole 
counties and states and intimidate those out of 
work from taking the employment given up by 
their fellow- workmen. 

Thirty, and even twenty, years ago the labor 
problem was in great measure a problem of ir- 
responsible violence, which produced temporary 
anarchy at one time in Pennsylvania and at 
another in lUinois. Strikes produced it, but no 
one seemed responsible for it. Irresponsibility 
enabled the violent among the strikers to maim, 
beat, and frighten their reluctant and peaceable 
fellows away from their work. What solved the 
difficulty was an application by the courts to 
those disputes of a principle of responsibility 
which made violence impossible. The injunction 
was not a new remedy, but it had seldom or 
never been applied before in this class of cases. 
But when sympathy with strikes paralyzed the 
local executive, responsibility of this other sort 
was imposed by the courts by the means of pre- 
ventive justice. The practice struck people as 
novel and surprising because it was applied on 
a great scale, but the method of prevention, as 
a means of anticipating violence and irreparable 
injury, was centuries old. The novelty lay in 



RESPONSIBILITY 79 

the circumstances. The rage and fury produced 
by "government by injunction" was exactly 
measured by the binding force of the responsi- 
bility fastened upon those contemplating in- 
timidation and violence. This responsibility 
was responsibility to the courts, and it was en- 
forced, as it always has been, by summary 
arrests, fine, and imprisonment for contempt of 
process. In this way for some years now the 
courts have enforced a responsibility which could 
not be enforced in any other way, and compara- 
tive order has reigned in strikes, and boycotting 
and picketing have been stopped, where formerly 
for the time being the mob seemed destined to 
have undisputed sway. The unanimous deci- 
sion of the Supreme Court in the Debs case is 
the landmark in this chapter of the great strug- 
gle between labor and capital, and if to-day we 
listen with equanimity to the perpetually re- 
curring threats of violence which accompany 
every strike, it is because the courts have found 
a way through the writ of injunction of paralyz- 
ing violence and outrage, and preserving order. 
Take away the power to enjoin and to make 
decrees respected and you will return at once 
to the state of affairs which prevailed during the 



8o THE DEMOCRATIC MISTAKE 

Pittsburgh riots and the anarchy in Chicago. 
Responsibility of this kind leaders who gain in 
power through irresponsibility do not like. 
Messrs. Gompers, Morrison, and Mitchell resent 
responsibility here just as, in another field, the 
Emperor of Germany resents it. They prefer 
arbitrary power. The courts have in this case 
come to the rescue of the weakness of the 
executive and legislature. The sort of respon- 
sibility which was obviously needed was the 
responsibiHty of a corporation. If the legisla- 
ture had compelled the unions to incorporate 
themselves — if they were to do so to-morrow 
— the treasurer and officers and funds of the 
union would be held legally responsible, and 
injunctions and judgments would shock no one. 
Paralyze this power to prevent violence and 
damage to property and business and you 
would at once restore the irresponsibility from 
which the injunctions have saved us. Perceiv- 
ing this, those who dislike injunctions more 
than they do violence have resorted to the 
ingenious proposal that punishment of violation 
of injunctions shall be by jury trial, a mode of 
enforcing judicial decrees never before resorted 
to because it interposes a delay through which 



RESPONSIBILITY 8i 

the mob, the conductor of the boycott, or the 
picket may accompHsh its object while the 
right of the court to prevent it is being argued. 
The whole history of these labor injunctions is 
the history of an attempt on the part of a class 
to exempt itself from ordinary responsibility to 
law and the community, and of the successful 
adaptation by the legal branch of government 
of a means of enforcing the same responsibility.^ 
The principle of responsibility, then, pervades 
not only the whole body politic, but all human 
affairs, private as well as public. It is that with- 
out which no club can be managed, no ship 
sailed, no company drilled, no family be kept 
together, no church maintain an organization, 
and finally no state exist. It inheres in the 
structure and framework of the government of 
a state; and there it is used as the means by 
which those who enjoy the power of the state 
and are vested with its sovereignty, distribute 
this power among their agents, judicial, legisla- 
tive, and executive, and artificially secure the 

* It is hardly necessary to dwell upon the point that the result 
— the establishment of the injunction as an ordinary remedy 
in labor disputes — is a highly beneficial result for labor; for the 
alternative is always anarchy, in which both sides employ force, 
and the more powerful, that is the better organized, the more 
skilful, and the richer, carries the day. 



82 THE DEMOCRATIC MISTAKE 

performance of their duties. This artificial po- 
litical responsibility is totally different from 
custom and habit; though it may make use of 
them, there is no reason why it should be con- 
founded with them. 

The operation of responsibility on human be- 
ings can best be understood by looking into 
what happens when it is wholly removed. Le 
Bon, in his examination of the "Psychology of 
Crowds," writes, if I am not mistaken, under 
the influence of the error to which all writers 
on these subjects are continually exposed, of 
treating a crowd not as a general term for a 
gathering of individual human beings, but as a 
human being itself; he personifies a crowd. Of 
the truth of the facts which he observes about 
it, however, there is no doubt, and the first 
of these is that, as compared with the individuals 
who compose it, it is destitute of responsibility; 
it easily becomes a mob and then acts like a 
wild beast, and will murder, plunder, and burn 
when the persons who compose it would ordi- 
narily do none of these things. But he gives no 
explanation of these curious facts, which have 
been recognized for centuries, though not be- 
fore, perhaps, so clearly put. The reason is fur- 



RESPONSIBILITY S^ 

nished by the fact that its numbers take away 
or greatly diminish the force of the motives 
which lead individuals to behave, as we say, in 
a responsible manner. Not only is the burning, 
murdering, and plundering done collectively, so 
that each one can say "My part in it is very 
slight" and "Had I not been there the result 
would have been the same"; but where a thou- 
sand persons take part in an outrage the or- 
dinary legal responsibility is wanting. Since 
they can hardly all be punished, the probability 
is that no one will be; hence all the inhibitive 
forces which make man a responsible agent are 
impaired, and the collective impulse to do what- 
ever is suggested greatly inflamed. Even the 
ordinary risk of censure — the fear of the loss of 
the good opinion of neighbors — is hardly of any 
effect, because the mob is made up of many neigh- 
bors. When the sympathies of the dominant 
portion of the community are on the side of the 
violence or outrage, responsibility or the risk 
of being held accountable in the forum of either 
law or morals is practically non-existent, and it 
is on this account that history is full of religious 
and race massacres, and lynchings such as we 
tolerate. The horrors of a mutiny on shipboard 



84 THE DEMOCRATIC MISTAKE 

come from the sudden removal of individual re- 
sponsibility. Make the crowd a holiday pro- 
cession, escorted by a few policemen, and it 
behaves like an ordinary responsible individual; 
each member of it is still actually answerable 
morally, socially, and legally. Let this same 
procession meet another against which it has 
a race or a religious passion and the police- 
men be partisans on both sides: responsibiHty 
vanishes, and the very same individuals who 
were before peaceable and quiet become riotous 
and even murderous. The ancients understood 
this, but they did not well understand its cause. 
Hamilton put it in an epigram by saying that 
if every Athenian had been a Socrates, the 
Athenian Assembly would still have been a 
mob. 



LECTURE III 
THE DEMOCRATIC MISTAKE 



THE DEMOCRATIC MISTAKE 

So far as we have gone, I believe all the great 
modern writers on the actual operation of gov- 
ernment support the principle of responsibility 
by implication at least. But there has been the 
widest diversity as to its true application. 

This diversity, I think, has come in great part 
from an intellectual tendency which is the curse 
of all true inquiry into practical matters. When 
responsibility to the people was first heard of 
as a cardinal principle of government, it was 
introduced, as explained by Mill, to answer the 
questions : How shall abuses of authority be pre- 
vented ? How shall we make it certain that the 
greatest happiness of the greatest number, or 
the general welfare, shall be steadily kept in 
view by those who are intrusted with the work 
of government? There is only one way — by 
making them responsible to the body whose in- 
terest is at all times the interest of the whole 
community, i. e., the body of the community 
itself. It followed from this that to insure re- 

87 



88 THE DEMOCRATIC MISTAKE 

sponsibility in the government, its agents must 
be responsible to the people. The electorate must 
be sufficiently large to secure this. The political 
philosophy of Bentham and of the democracy 
of Jefferson may all be summed up in this. The 
universal suffrage of to-day is only an appHca- 
tion of it. It is all founded on a theory of re- 
sponsibiHty, sound enough in itself, but hitherto 
used, if I am not much mistaken, in an erroneous 
way by its most enthusiastic supporters. 

Speculation is always ready to stop at a gen- 
eral term or phrase and misuse the idea under- 
lying it. Responsibility to the body of the peo- 
ple through the ballot is a general conception or 
term like liberty or equality. But it immedi- 
ately became in the minds of the early advocates 
of democracy in this country something quite 
different; and if the fantastic speculations of 
Mr. Bryan about it to-day puzzle and amaze us, 
it must be said in his defence that he has done lit- 
tle more than caricature the speculations on this 
subject of an earlier day. Those who kept their 
heads when this shibboleth of democracy first 
came into vogue were the Federalists, and it is 
well known that they thought their opponents 
crazy, or nearly so. 



THE DEMOCRATIC MISTAKE 89 

The JefFersonian method of employing re- 
sponsibility we know all about, for it has been 
gradually developed for a hundred years and is 
now flourishing in great perfection. It may be 
summed up in this way: All abuses of power are 
cured by making him who has the power respon- 
sible to the people, i, e., to a 'popular vote. This 
is because responsibility means always respon- 
sibiHty through the ballot. As every official 
tends to enlarge his own powers, he must be 
made elective and, to prevent his enlarging 
them, responsibility through elections must be 
made as frequent as possible. The president or 
governor must have a short term. Legislatures 
must be annual, because "when annual elections 
end, tyranny begins"; judges must be made 
elective officers for comparatively short terms; 
a long term weakens responsibility and will make 
even a judge a tyrant.^ The idea is one of uni- 
versal application. If you wish a really good 
government, you must make the term of every 
official — selectman, hog-reeve, tree-warden, gov- 
ernor, and all — one year. Then, if the people 
are satisfied, they can give him another, but he 

^ In Oklahoma a Supreme Court judge holds office for eight 
years. 



90 THE DEMOCRATIC MISTAKE 

must be answerable at the end of one year 
through the ballot to the body which is the 
enemy of tyrants. Why a year was taken, why 
a month or a week was not thought well of for 
some offices, is not clear. Nor was the theory 
ever applied in its full perfection to the judici- 
ary; for continuity's sake in the administration 
of justice judges must remain on the bench a few 
years. In New York the theorists went as far 
as they dared in making the judiciary elective 
for a comparatively short term, and they were 
followed generally. In Massachusetts, and a 
few other States, the old judicial tenure was 
saved; throughout the rest of the body pohtic 
the panacea of annual elections was thoroughly 
applied. 

The difficulty with the whole system was that, 
while founded on a perfectly correct idea, the 
deductions were from the idea and not from the 
facts of life from which the conception was gen- 
eralized. Apply analysis to responsibility in the 
actual operation of government, and it appears 
clear that responsibility means answerability by 
some one to some one, for something, by certain 
means. If the means proposed are a popular 
annual election, before knowing whether these 



\ 



THE DEMOCRATIC MISTAKE 91 

means can be successfully resorted to to make, 
let us say, a judge accountable to the commu- 
nity for the discharge of his duties, we must ask 
what the duties are, what the tenure required 
for their performance is, how he will get his 
nomination, whether the body of voters can 
judge of his performance of his duties, etc., etc. 
If the question is as to a legislator, the answer 
will not necessarily be the same; still less if it is 
as to a governor or sheriff. In other words, the 
way to make a public servant really responsible 
must depend, not on making his office elective 
and for a short term, but on all the circumstances 
of the case. Universal suffrage may provide 
the means; again it may not. I have ventured 
to call the opposite view, that responsibiUty 
is to be secured by popular election at short in- 
tervals, the democratic mistake. I might, with- 
out danger of extravagance, have called it the 
democratic delusion. 

The first question in the contrived structure 
of any government is how to make use of the 
principle of political responsibility so as to get 
the work of government effectively done. When 
the community is small and the sovereign powers 
are concentrated in the hands of one person, the 



92 THE DEMOCRATIC MISTAKE 

solution seems comparatively easy. Is a tax 
necessary? He has it collected. Is a war to be 
carried on? He raises the army and heads it. 
Is justice to be administered? He does it him- 
self or appoints judges to do it. All the powers 
of the state are vested in him; all agents are 
responsible to him because they are removable 
at will by him. But in a modern popular gov- 
ernment, where the powers of the state are 
vested in a vast number of people, the problem 
is quite a different one. The community, or the 
electorate within it, can practically do nothing 
but vote, i. e., select for office this or that man, 
and decide negatively or affirmatively on this 
or that legal or constitutional provision. Their 
highest function is to adopt or reject a constitu- 
tion. As we have seen, since primitive sover- 
eignty was generally personal when popular 
government was introduced in modern states, 
it was inevitable that the principle of responsi- 
bility to the new sovereign through a direct vote 
should have been adopted as the foundation of 
popular government. There was no doubt in 
any one*s mind — even in minds as opposite as 
those of Jefferson and Bentham — that the only 
means of preventing abuses of power and secur- 



THE DEMOCRATIC MISTAKE 93 

ing the welfare of the community was through 
responsibility to the community; the corollary, 
that the most effective way of enforcing this re- 
sponsibility was through sending representatives 
to prevent and do away with abuses, and keep- 
ing those representatives responsible through 
elections, seemed to follow naturally. This, as 
has already been said, is the view of responsi- 
biUty put forward by the democratic writers of 
a century ago. Their heirs, however, proceeded 
to develop the idea in a novel way; not content 
with the logical step of widening the basis of 
sovereign power, then in the hands of property 
owners, by introducing universal suffrage, they 
proceeded to secure responsibility by introduc- 
ing the elective principle into all offices of gov- 
ernment wherever practicable, and, to make 
doubly sure, by making the tenure as short as 
possible. 

Not content even with this, they went farther, 
and, as often happens, they wrenched a mis- 
understood principle from its original purpose 
and misapplied it in a new field. If when annual 
elections ended tyranny began, there was not only 
a connection between short elective terms and 
responsibility, but the cure for the old difficulty, 



94 THE DEMOCRATIC MISTAKE 

that any official who stayed in office tended to 
become despotic, was simple. Short terms were 
just as good for executive clerks as for legislators; 
in other words, as the key to good legislation 
was annual election, so the key to good admin- 
istration in the clerical and administrative ser- 
vice, where the tenure was by appointment, was 
rotation in office. In another generation, rota- 
tion in office had substituted for true political 
responsibility that baleful species of answera- 
bility which means nothing but favor and pat- 
ronage, and was now stoutly defended as an 
essential principle in a democratic state. 

At this point, having stated what I believe 
the democratic mistake to be, it seems best, for 
the sake of clearness, to state more explicitly 
what I believe to be the true — and opposed — 
theory. I believe that the only effective method 
of securing responsibility to the people (by which 
is meant in most cases the faithful and efficient 
discharge of official duty as prescribed by law) 
is secure tenure (involving necessarily infrequent 
elections), and that the responsibility actually 
secured by the system of frequent elections and 
consequent insecure tenure is responsibility less 
to the people than to an arbitrary and irrespon- 



THE DEMOCRATIC MISTAKE 95 

sible private employer or employers, at the head 
of what is known as the Machine; that through 
it the boss or bosses of the machine become the 
real master or masters of the so-called servant 
of the state, cHnching his allegiance by means of 
the salary of an office controlled through the 
party nomination and party vote, and exacting 
in return for such security implicit obedience, 
not to the state but to themselves. 

This view of the subject is founded on a very 
simple fact — the close resemblance between pub- 
lic and private business. It is at this point that 
the analogy between Man and the State is most 
plain. How is responsibihty to the owners for 
the management of a private business secured .? 
As to all those who do the actual work, by mak- 
ing a faithful discharge of the duty of the par- 
ticular office — treasurer, secretary, head of de- 
partment — mean a tenure during good behavior, 
promotion, often provision for old age, and se- 
curity against arbitrary removal, except so far as 
change of circumstances makes this impossible. 
In every private business, so far as well man- 
aged, this has for untold ages been the system; 
and moreover it is the only system known to 
man by which fidelity to the ends of the busi- 



96 THE DEMOCRATIC MISTAKE 

ness, that is, responsibility, is secured. Nobody 
in private business ever dreams of securing it in 
any other way, and any one who should propose 
to secure it by any other means would not be 
listened to. 

Now, there is no difference between the or- 
dinary every-day business of the government, 
whether monarchy, aristocracy, or democracy, 
and a private business in this respect. The end 
in view is public, but the function itself is not 
on that account of a different nature. An officer 
of customs or tax-collector collects a tax; a rail- 
road conductor collects fares; a freight agent, 
freight; the bookkeeper of a merchant, bills; but 
the function is the same — that of collecting 
money for his principal. A postmaster dis- 
tributes the mail; an express company's agent 
distributes parcels. The character of the work 
is not different in the two cases. InteUigence is 
transmitted by telegraph or telephone. In one 
country it is a private function; in another it is 
a function of government. Here the thing done 
is precisely the same. Are the means of securing 
fidelity to the company in one case, to the sover- 
eign in the other, to be different? 

It is very true that when we come to the 



THE DEMOCRATIC MISTAKE 97 

managers of the business, the directors of a rail- 
way or bank, or any other business too large 
and varied to be managed except by a large body 
of men, the elective principle is appHed, but it 
is applied here for exactly the same reason that 
it is appHed in public affairs, and on exactly 
the principle laid down by Bentham — that the 
general welfare of the business may be watched 
and guarded by the only class which can he relied 
upon not to have interests opposed to this general 
welfare — i. e,, owners or stockholders. 

And so in public affairs, responsibihty to the 
people must be secured — in the case of the legis- 
lature, in the case of constitutional conventions, 
in the case of constitutional amendments, by 
some sort of a vote, representative or direct; 
but this does not relate to the transaction of 
ordinary public business, but to the determina- 
tion of public policy, to changes in it, to modifi- 
cations in the sphere of government, etc. In 
any discussion of government by design, this is 
the line which separates the questions which 
must be, and those which cannot be, success- 
fully determined by suffrage. I shall go into 
this from another point of view in another 
lecture. 



98 THE DEMOCRATIC MISTAKE 

Fortunately for us, the structure and frame- 
work of the federal government had been de- 
vised mainly under the influence of a true 
theory of responsibility, and the success which 
upon the whole has attended the work is due to 
this. It may be worth while to stop here, before 
considering the point further, and glance at the 
scheme of the federal constitution, the great 
exemplar of modern written constitutions in the 
English-speaking world. 

The Federalist is sometimes thoughtlessly 
treated as an argument by pronounced partisans 
in favor of a party measure. But it is in fact 
throughout occupied with discussing the con- 
formity of the proposed constitution to true 
republican principles, as applicable to the Amer- 
ican community of that day for the purpose of 
forming a new government; and it is here that 
we have brought into view that theory of the 
operation of government through human mo- 
tive which, as I believe, must furnish, and has 
always furnished, the basis of all successful gov- 
ernment. The reason why it becomes so much 
plainer in the federal than in the state consti- 
tutions is that the former is not, like them, in 
part an historical grov/th, but came into being 



THE DEMOCRATIC MISTAKE 99 

a perfected contrivance, in answer to the ques- 
tion then supposed to be unsolved: Are human 
beings capable of establishing good government 
by reflection and choice ? The framers also were 
exempted from the discussion of that most diffi- 
cult of all questions — the abstract sphere and 
province of government. For them the sphere 
of government was merely such powers as were 
required from the States to enable them to form 
an energetic and stable federal government, 
while the great mass of sovereignty was left 
where they found it — in the States themselves. 
Much has been said of recent years about the 
very slight prevision which the framers of the 
constitution had of the vast changes that were 
to transform the fabric of social existence in the 
United States; and it seems to be thought in a 
good many quarters that their scheme has 
broken down. The most favorable view gen- 
erally expressed is that wonders were done con- 
sidering how little they had to go by in the way 
of experience. The best way to gauge their work 
I have found to be to take the constitution as 
they left it, compare their scheme as far as pos- 
sible with the actual result, and thus judge of 
their theory. 



loo THE DEMOCRATIC MISTAKE 

To give a very brief survey, half of the Feder- 
alist is taken up with showing that to have vigor 
enough to maintain itself the new constitution 
must be a government acting directly upon the 
individual citizen, and that a federation of 
States such as had hitherto existed would not 
answer. To analyze this into terms of responsi- 
bility, the first necessity of every government 
is means of defence. The States had hitherto 
been bound to furnish men and money, but they 
were not poHtically or legally responsible for 
not doing it. Except through violence or war, 
they could not as agents of the confederation be 
made to do it. There was an obHgation, but 
they were not answerable under the older con- 
stitution for the discharge of it. The remedy 
was to clothe the citizen directly with the legal 
responsibiHty to the central government in these 
respects. Had this view not prevailed, had not 
the Union as we know it been established, the 
right of secession must have existed. This 
change, which introduced the ordinary respon- 
sibility before the law, instead of the irrespon- 
sibility of sovereign states, was what furnished 
the legal basis for the appeal to save the Union 
two generations later. The Federalist never 



THE DEMOCRATIC MISTAKE loi 

became in the days of Calhoun and his followers 
a book of authority in the South. What the 
authors say about the irresponsible character of 
the old confederacy and the impotence of the 
old central government in the face of State rights 
makes the explanation of this very simple. The 
device resorted to made federated States respon- 
sible to the People of the new Republic. 

The rest of the Federalist is mainly occupied 
with an explanation of the means taken by the 
framers of the constitution to make effective the 
responsibility of the Legislature, the Executive, 
and the Judiciary of the new government for the 
functions which they were to discharge, partly 
through the separation of the powers which is 
designed to prevent the usurpation of the func- 
tions of one department by another, and partly 
through either election or appointment. Here 
again, although the distinction is not made in 
so many words, a sharp line is drawn between 
those cases in which responsibility is necessarily 
secured through election, i, e.y where there is no 
other way, and those in which it is only naturally 
and effectively secured by other means. There 
is no way under popular government of provid- 
ing a legislature for a large community, except 



I02 THE DEMOCRATIC MISTAKE 

through representation, which means election of 
some sort. There is no way of providing an ex- 
ecutive, independent of the legislature, except 
through popular election. It was accordingly 
provided that the House of Representatives 
should be made up of representatives directly 
elected by the people; to balance its power, the 
Senate was to be made up of representatives of 
the States. But when the framers of the Con- 
stitution came to the judicial power, they made 
the office appointive, and the tenure for life, 
unless terminated by a proceeding in itself 
judicial. As to the executive, they made one 
mistake, which was a natural one — that of not 
foreseeing that an electoral college, meeting by 
States, would degenerate into a body of political 
dummies. That mistake arose from a simple 
cause : they had not the means of foreseeing a 
fact tolerably famihar to us, that whenever you 
lodge the nominating power in an elective body, 
whether a convention, a legislature, or a college 
got together ad hoc, you merely tend to throw 
the actual source of nomination into the grasp of 
the constituents of the elective body. This mis- 
take has had, however, less influence than might 
have been expected. In the main, the Presi- 



THE DEMOCRATIC MISTAKE 103 

dents of the United States have been represen- 
tative men, and there have been among them, 
to say the least, in proportion to the whole num- 
ber and duration of tenure, as many men of 
conspicuous ability and distinction and as few 
distinctly mischievous rulers as any other gov- 
ernment can show. Generally they have been 
responsible; that is, they have discharged the 
duties of their office in the way intended by the 
Constitution, and, when they have not done so, 
their responsibihty has been enforced by the 
means provided in the Constitution; that is, by 
those very ingenious checks and balances de- 
signed by the convention and explained in the 
Federalist, It is an interesting fact, corrobora- 
tive, I think, of much that I have said, that the 
chief complaint to-day heard about the execu- 
tive office is that the tenure ought to be longer 
than four years, and elections less frequent. 

When we come to the judicial power, we see 
the view of government which is founded on re- 
sponsibility at its clearest. The object is to get 
a judiciary which will be incorrupt, competent, 
and absolutely independent of the legislature 
and of the executive. The appointment is given 
to the President and Senate, so that the pat- 



I04 THE DEMOCRATIC MISTAKE 

ronage may not absolutely vest in either; tenure 
is made during good behavior; and direct re- 
sponsibility is enforced through impeachment. 
But the responsibility of a judge may be affected 
in other ways. The great blight upon the ju- 
dicial power in the past had been its depen- 
dence upon one or both the other departments, 
through removal or control of the means of sup- 
port. The danger of improper removal having 
been obviated by making the tenure practically 
for life, independence as to salary was secured 
through the provision that federal judges shall 
receive a compensation which shall not be dimin- 
ished during their continuance in office. These 
provisions left the federal judges free to dis- 
charge their duty, punishable for not doing it. 
Hamilton foresaw that the judiciary would 
have the power to declare unconstitutional laws 
void as in conflict with the fundamental law, 
but he also knew that this was a power which 
would never lead to judicial usurpation for the 
reason that the judiciary itself has no power 
except through the executive arm. This is 
another feature of judicial responsibility under 
our system which people seldom notice. Dema- 
gogues rant about the danger to liberty from 



THE DEMOCRATIC MISTAKE 105 

the courts. But, as Hamilton pointed out, it is 
the other departments which have the power of 
the purse and of the sword. The courts have 
no control in these fields; they have neither force 
nor will of their own, but merely judgment. It 
is the purely rational department. This is the 
reason why it has always been so difficult to 
make it independent and secure; it is also the 
reason why it does not, left to itself, usurp. 

In the preceding centuries there had been no 
difficulty in making it subservient to the execu- 
tive or the people. It had done their bidding 
only too well. It had condemned Socrates, it 
had committed thousands of judicial murders, 
it had stifled the press; but it had never been 
made by deliberate contrivance, through se- 
curity of its tenure and support, at once inde- 
pendent and responsible solely for a good dis- 
charge of the judicial office. There is no more 
convincing demonstration than the chapters in 
the Federalist which relate to this subject. If 
any one doubts that the operation of a govern- 
ment depends upon a nice study of the play of 
human motive under the influence of constant 
causes, he should carefully study them. And if 
not satisfied a priori with the reasoning, let 



io6 THE DEMOCRATIC MISTAKE 

him ask himself as to the result. The federal 
judiciary as a matter of fact has played for more 
than a century exactly the part assigned to it 
by the framers of the Constitution. It has been 
powerful by weight of reasoning, it has been in- 
dependent in the exercise of power, and it has 
been uncorrupted. It has vindicated the Con- 
stitution, and been a wonderful proof of what 
human contrivance and forethought can do in 
directing the operation of government through 
the play of ordinary motive in such a way that 
it shall prove responsible to the people for the 
efficient performance of the work assigned to it. 
Turn to the judiciary of the States and see 
what a contrast is presented ! Taking from the 
early phrasemongers and theorists a false theory 
of responsibiHty — that it could only be obtained 
through frequent elections — the States have 
done their best to make the judiciary the foot- 
ball of politics. The effect of the elective sys- 
tem in those great centres of life where we 
should expect to find, and most need, the best 
courts is to throw the selection of judges into 
the hands of the controller of the local ma- 
chine; i. e., to make nominations depend upon 
his favor; in other words, to make it neces- 



THE DEMOCRATIC MISTAKE 107 

sary to gain and keep his favor. This is the end 
of independence and the beginning of a system 
of purchase. Responsibility is now in part re- 
sponsibility to a secret power, and the amount 
of money paid for nominations becomes a mat- 
ter of newspaper discussion. Favors must be 
paid for by favors, and in such a system there 
can never be the assurance of purity nor inde- 
pendence nor ability. The leaders of the bar 
cannot get onto the bench. ^ 

In all this there is nothing novel; the facts 
have been known and admitted for a long time; 
the deplorable thing is that it is not yet per- 
ceived that the whole system is the ripe fruit of a 
false theory of democracy, which cannot be got 
rid of by any means short of its abandonment. 
Here you have side by side the two systems, 
one, the operation of which has been demon- 
strated in two countries, England and the United 
States, and several of our older States; the other, 
frequently denounced by the press of the com- 
mercial capital of the country, in a State which 
contains something like a tenth of the popula- 

^ In our time the absence of names of leaders of the bar, in 
the city of New York, of the first rank, who have gone onto the 
Supreme bench, or that of the Court of Appeals, has often been 
noticed. 



io8 THE DEMOCRATIC MISTAKE 

tion of the whole country. The only reply that 
I have ever heard is that the elective system 
works well **in the country." What this really 
means is that its evil effects are by no means so 
evident in the country, where the interests at 
stake are usually not so great. But what is 
wanted is a judiciary which is as nearly perfect 
as possible in the great cities. Our population 
and wealth have ceased to be rural. In Massa- 
chusetts and a few other States, judicial systems 
substantially the same as that of the United 
States have been preserved; in those there is 
no such scandal, and no such singular com- 
parison to be made with the federal judiciary. 

In 1902 a representative of the Standard Oil 
Company wrote to Senator Foraker reminding 
him of Judge Burket's candidacy for re-election 
to the Supreme Court bench of Ohio, urging 
his re-election strongly on the ground of "his 
eminent qualifications and great integrity," and 
expressing the hope that he (Senator Foraker) 
would aid his re-election. There could not be a 
better illustration of the way the elective ma- 
chinery for judges works to degrade the judi- 
ciary. The idea that a great corporation (and 
most of the wealth of the country is in the hands 



THE DEMOCRATIC MISTAKE 109 

of corporations), always in the courts as plaintiff 
or defendant, will spend the whole year in care- 
fully looking after its own interests and then at 
election time stop and devote itself to securing 
impartial judges, responsible only to the people, 
is founded on a conception of human nature 
and ideas of government which are nonsensical. 
What they will do, as we all know, is to fur- 
ther the election of judges who are not likely to 
be adverse to them; and in such a" case, however 
eminent and honest a judge may be, as he always 
knows in the long run who his supporters are, 
he will be made to feel that he owes his place 
in a measure to this very corporation. However 
excellent the man, there is an attempt to put 
him under the influence of improper motives. 
It is not only his integrity, but general confi- 
dence in his integrity, that is wanted; when the 
letter to Senator Foraker became public, this it 
was that made a scandal of it. The only pos- 
sible means of doing away with this pitfall is 
the selection of judges by other than elective 
machinery and making their tenure secure. 

The operation of this false theory of responsi- 
bility, which seeks to secure good government by 
short tenure and constant appeal to the elective 



no THE DEMOCRATIC MISTAKE 

principle, is most clearly seen in the judicial sys- 
tem, but it exists everywhere. "When annual 
elections end tyranny begins" does not find 
an echo in our breasts to-day, because we have 
learned by bitter experience that frequent elec- 
tions are no safeguard against bossdom. The 
movement for biennial elections which has 
spread over the United States in our time would 
never have gained such headway, or gone into 
operation in so many States, had it not been 
found that the shortness of the term of the legis- 
lature was of no avail in this respect. Can any- 
thing be conceived which will more certainly 
produce irresponsible legislatures in a commu- 
nity like ours than a short term of office? The 
shortness of the term makes the tenure insecure, 
while the amount of work required is very con- 
siderable; men of the first rank in character or 
position cannot afford to spend half the year 
in such routine work as that of the State legis- 
latures. Forty years ago it was argued that the 
whole difficulty came from people being unwill- 
ing to go to the primaries and "attend to their 
political duties." Now, the work of the State 
legislatures being thoroughly satisfactory to no- 
body, the far saner view is taken that we may at 



THE DEMOCRATIC MISTAKE iii 

any rate cut it down in amount and expense by 
giving up the annual use of them. If an exami- 
nation be made as to the amount of general legis- 
lation needed annually by such States as New 
York or Massachusetts, it will be found to be 
comparatively small. A large part of the or- 
dinary work of the governor of New York has 
come to consist of vetoing bills plainly uncon- 
stitutional or otherwise improper. But in Mas- 
sachusetts tyranny is still kept at bay by annual 
elections, and in New York, while we have a 
biennially elected Senate, we still have an an- 
nual legislature. 

In New York, certainly, it is not generally 
beUeved that increase of legislation means in- 
creased good government. In 1870 the legis- 
lature turned out two bulky volumes of statutes, 
nearly two thousand four hundred pages in all. 
The downfall of Tweed and the improvement of 
the membership of the legislature followed, and 
in 1879 they produced a modest volume of some 
seven hundred pages. By 1908 the volumes 
were again swollen to the old dimensions. It 
is often forgotten that the law of supply and 
demand applies with peculiar force to legisla- 
tion. The assemblage of the legislature is vir- 



112 THE DEMOCRATIC MISTAKE 

tually the establishment of a statute factory 
open to all comers; it fosters legislation of itself. 
In Mississippi, where there are no enormous 
cities, they only allow the legislature to meet 
once in four years, with the exception of a spe- 
cial session of thirty days, which cannot be 
lengthened except by the governor. At such 
special sessions none but appropriation and 
revenue bills can be considered, or extraordinary 
matters called to the attention of the legislature 
by the governor. If when annual elections end 
tyranny begins, tyranny would certainly seem 
to have taken root in Mississippi. Yet we hear 
no complaints of it, though these provisions 
have been in force for some twenty years. 

ResponsibiHty to the people by annual elec- 
tion sounded a hundred years ago to the Demo- 
cratic theorists as if they had discovered a law 
in the moral world of the same sort of value as 
the law of gravitation in the physical. When 
stated it seemed to prove itself. The power of 
phrases and the ease with which they are used 
to influence poHtical action was never better 
illustrated. Contarini Fleming, the youthful 
hero of Disraeli's novel, comes back from school 
to his father — a public man and political philos- 



THE DEMOCRATIC MISTAKE 113 

opher of a species that never dies — and com- 
plains to him bitterly that he is taught nothing 
but *'words." His father, wishing to get at what 
is in his mind, asks him what he would be 
taught. "Ideas," he cries passionately. "My 
son," his father says, "few ideas are correct 
ones, and what are correct no one can ascertain; 
but with words we govern men." 

To sum up what has been said: Bentham and 
Jefferson, both extraordinary men, gifted with 
a prophetic political insight, foresaw, one in 
England, the other in America, the reign of 
democracy, and pointed out the principle on 
which it must rest. But, like many other great 
men, the very clearness with which they saw 
one aspect of the subject blinded them to the 
fact that they did not see the whole of it. Ham- 
ilton, a genius of another sort, saw exactly what 
they failed to perceive. Two succeeding gen- 
erations neglected what Hamilton saw, and 
blindly misapplied in every direction the prin- 
ciples of Bentham and Jefferson. In accom- 
plishing its work the historical party which did 
this very nearly destroyed itself. In its effort 
to enforce responsibility through elective ma- 
chinery it has paralyzed real responsibility in 



114 THE DEMOCRATIC MISTAKE 

every direction, and has, some people think, 
become incapable of either producing leaders or 
of holding its old opponent to that party re- 
sponsibility which it once knew how to teach. 
Can it retrace its steps ? Or, rather, can we re- 
trace ours? For, at present, the delusion as 
to responsibihty being attainable by the bal- 
lot alone seems to infect both parties almost 
equally. 



LECTURE IV 
PATRONAGE AND THE MACHINE 



PATRONAGE AND THE MACHINE 

In the previous lectures I have endeavored 
to establish the following points with reference 
to popular government, such as that under 
which we live. Firsts that a popular govern- 
ment, though partly a growth, so far as its oper- 
ation is arranged beforehand by human design, 
must be contrived upon some theory; second, 
that this theory must depend on the view we 
take both of the nature of man and of the nature 
of government; third, that with regard to the 
former the one point upon which there is a 
general agreement^ is that, for the satisfaction 
of certain wants, some of which are constant 
while others vary with surrounding circum- 
stances, man is capable of imposing upon his 
fellows, and his fellows are willing to undertake 
an artificial species of responsibility acting 
through constant motives, which may be aided 
by, or, on the other hand, run counter to, what 
we call moral and religious responsibility,^ and 

^ The buccaneers of the Spanish Main established among them- 
selves for a time a species of anti-social order, enforced by a rigid 

117 



ii8 THE DEMOCRATIC MISTAKE 

under which the officer or servant of the gov- 
ernment becomes answerable for a poHtical 
task; fourth, that side by side with, or rather 
within, this machinery of political responsibil- 
ity exists the every-day legal responsibility of 
the citizen, or subject, for his acts and omissions, 
the task here being the administration of justice 
(one of the constant wants of man) ; fifth, that 
in what we call a republic, i, e., a community 
living under common laws and a popular gov- 
ernment within defined boundaries, this respon- 
sibiHty is ultimately founded on the idea of 
answerability to the people, or community as a 
whole, through the exercise of the suffrage; 
sixth, that, from the time of Jefferson down to 
our day, the mistake had been made, in our 
theory and practice, of assuming that, because 
the ultimate responsibility was to the people, 
therefore the way to secure responsibility in 
office must uniformly be through some sort of 
elective machinery; that not merely would the 
legislative and executive head be responsible to 
the people if elected by the people, but that this 
principle was equally true of every sheriff, as- 

responsibillty comprehending a quasi legal system of rewards 
and punishments — the object of the whole being plunder by means 
of piracy and rapine. 



PATRONAGE AND THE MACHINE 119 

sessor, collector, or other subordinate; that not 
merely must legislators be elected, but that they 
must be elected as often as possible; finally, 
that, in exactly the same way, judges would not 
really be responsible for the proper discharge of 
their duty unless they too were all elected fre- 
quently; seventh^ that, by a still further and cu- 
rious misapplication of an idea in itself not er- 
roneous, the monstrous conclusion was reached 
that a short tenure of office, as it sometimes pro- 
duced greater responsibiHty when the office was 
elective, would also produce it when the tenure 
was by appointment.^ 

To trace all the consequences of this mistake 
would require a great deal of time, but what 
may be worth while is to point out some of its 
consequences in regard to the operation of the 
principle of responsibility; and, above all, the 
connection of the mistake with the creation of 
that contrivance within a contrivance which we 
know and justly dread as the great enemy in 
our day of individual freedom and character in 

* Rotation in ofEce, supposed to have been originally adopted 
in the states of antiquity in obedience to an analogy between the 
functions of government and the apparent rotation in its orbit 
of the sun, notwithstanding it had become a gross abuse, was 
stoutly defended down to a very recent period as vitally connected 
with the principle of responsibility. 



120 THE DEMOCRATIC MISTAKE 

government — the Machine — our incarnation of 
what might be called the ancient enemy of all 
good government — Patronage. 

When the Constitution of the United States 
was framed, the modern system of nomination 
by regularly organized representative bodies 
was undreamed of. The suffrage was in the 
hands of property owners, a comparatively small 
class, and nominations were very much what we 
should now Hke to have them — free. There were 
no primaries, there were no town, county, dis- 
trict, state, or national conventions of nominat- 
ing delegates. There were no "bosses" or office 
brokers. There was no great body of civil ser- 
vants because there were no great . federal or 
state fields of administration. It would have 
been a miraculously gifted vision which could 
have foreseen the change a hundred years was 
to produce. The story of that change — how the 
original freedom of nomination was strangled by 
the caucus, and this, to restore freedom, was 
supplanted by the convention system; how this 
latter system, originally intended to make nomi- 
nations representative, became in the course 
of fifty years a means of throwing the control 
of nominations everywhere into the hands of 



PATRONAGE AND THE MACHINE 121 

smaller and smaller numbers of people, until in 
New York, the greatest centre of population in 
the country, they now fall for years at a time 
into the hands of one man — the head of Tam- 
many Hall; how in both parties the same causes 
produced the same effects, and the national 
machine was so perfected with the aid of the 
skeleton negro delegations from the South as 
to bring within potential practical politics a 
presidential convention, controlled from Wash- 
ington by long-distance telephone — all this is 
familiar to us. It has produced a state of things 
generally recognized as highly dangerous to free 
institutions; it produces frequent revolts and 
continuous dissatisfaction and resentment. It 
was the cause of the movement for the Aus- 
tralian ballot, for independent nominations by 
petition, for the independent non-partisan move- 
ment in politics, which has long made the 
wealthiest and most populous State in the 
Union "doubtful"; and, finally, of the move- 
ment for the initiative, the referendum, the 
recall, and "direct primaries." 

The Machine, as it flourishes among us, al- 
though intrenched in party, is not party gov- 
ernment, with what used to be called party 



122 THE DEMOCRATIC MISTAKE 

responsibility. That responsibility which, as I 
have already said, still exists in a highly de- 
veloped form in England, was, as far as it went, 
a real, natural, extra-governmental responsi- 
bility, re-enforcing the contrived political re- 
sponsibiHty upon which the actual operation of 
government necessarily rests. It grows nat- 
urally out of a wide division in public opinion as 
to the proper policy to be pursued by the gov- 
ernment, and through it either party, having 
obtained possession of the government, is made 
accountable for misgovernment by being turned 
out of office. It was this sort of responsibility 
under which the Democratic party enjoyed its 
long lease of power before the war, and it was 
finally enforced by the Republican victory in 
i860. It was this sort of responsibility under 
which the Republican party administered the 
government down to 1884, and which the vic- 
tory of the Democrats under Cleveland in 
1884 and 1892 enforced. In England party 
responsibility is enforced whenever the Crown 
is obliged by the electorate to dispense with the 
service of the ministry for the time being. 

The machine, or organization, as, whenever it 
attains perfection, it is called by its adherents 



PATRONAGE AND THE MACHINE 123 

and managers, is something utterly at war with 
this. The very introduction of such terms shows 
how Httle it has to do with pubHc opinion or 
changes in it. The machine is an organization, 
outside of the government itself, consisting of a 
committee or committees, or congeries of com- 
mittees, representative in theory, but partly self- 
perpetuating in fact, which exists in either party 
for the control of nominations and the allot- 
ment of offices, and by these means for the di- 
vision of emoluments and profits. It consists 
of "working" politicians, mostly obscure men, 
who devote whatever time is necessary to poli- 
tics, and are enabled to do it by their irrespon- 
sible but acknowledged control of offices and 
salaries and expenditures. Responsible to no 
one, either legally or politically, in ordinary 
times it wields the power of the party. It is 
controlled by leaders whose power is as notorious 
as its source is hidden. In States like New York, 
Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and Ohio it has 
at its head a single man, or a very small number 
of men, unscrupulous, despotic, and secret. The 
machine, being a despotism of one or a few, 
cannot be managed democratically. The ma- 
chine may be, as is generally the case with 



124 THE DEMOCRATIC MISTAKE 

Tammany Hall, very ignorant, as educated 
men esteem knowledge; or its power may be, if 
the electorate behind the machine is of a better 
sort, lodged in the hands of a man of position 
and education; but in any case its function is 
not to deal with matters of opinion and belief, 
but to maintain a highly disciplined organiza- 
tion, miHtary in the blind obedience it exacts 
from legislative, executive, or other ofEce-holders, 
in return for which it brings out the vote when 
required, the vote supplying the ojffices and sal- 
aries and money which pay the troops and of- 
ficers and employees and camp followers. The 
head is responsible to no one, and may not even 
hold office; if he chooses to hold office, he is not 
responsible in office, because the same blind obe- 
dience which put him there may generally be 
relied on to keep him there in case he wishes to 
remain. It is needless to give illustrations. I 
asked the owner of a profitable private business, 
who was also an important officer of a leading 
State, which he found the more difficult occupa- 
tions He said at once, "Oh, my own business. 
In politics all there is to do is to obey orders." 
"The tyranny of the majority, "against which 
we used to be warned by critics of popular insti- 



PATRONAGE AND THE MACHINE 125 

tutions, was the tyranny of a dead level of opin- 
ions, habits, beliefs, and aspirations, such as a 
general equality of condition might produce, and 
such as some writers thought it did produce 
fifty years ago in this country. But the tyranny 
of the machine is something far worse; it is the 
negation of all opinion, and the substitution for 
it of a political drill, with the object of the undis- 
puted control of patronage, or, in other words, 
the offices, combined with immunity from all re- 
sponsibiHty, It is tyranny come to life again in 
the very centre of free institutions. So far as it 
is effective, free thought and free action die. 

If this view of* the subject is correct, it is clear 
that the great democratic mistake of multi- 
plying elections, shortening terms, and using the 
suffrage on every possible occasion as a decisive 
test has been the one thing predestined to pro- 
mote the development of the machine. In the 
eyes of our theorists the people of the State of 
New York are more perfectly protected against 
abuse of power on the part of rulers than any 
other people in the world. They have an annual 
session for the lower house; their judges are 
elected, hold office for a definite term, and are 
consequently responsible to the people; elec- 



126 THE DEMOCRATIC MISTAKE 

tions of all sorts are frequent and fair. In fact, 
there probably is no other place in the world 
where, in the course of a year, one can vote for so 
many candidates. But in fact their government 
is parcelled out by a close corporation, or rather 
two close corporations, which, nominally opposed 
to each other, have frequently had in the past 
a complete understanding. By common con- 
sent the result is unsatisfactory and undesirable, 
and at long intervals, as at the present time, a 
revolution ousts one machine or the other. But 
not generally for long. When the popular pas- 
sion subsides, and the popular Hercules who 
has swept out the Augean stable rests from his 
labors, or is elevated by his enemies into some 
position where he becomes harmless to them, 
the machine works again smoothly, the slate 
made up in secret is unanimously adopted by 
the prearranged convention, and the straight 
ticket is voted again. 

We have apparently verified, in this state of 
things, the predictions of aristocratic critics of 
democracy, that the barbarians fitted to destroy 
our civilization would not come from outside, 
but would be produced from the inside. 

As was said in the last lecture, the great puz- 



PATRONAGE AND THE MACHINE 127 

zle of American politics at the present time is the 
apparent paralysis of the opposition.^ Why is 
the destiny of the country dominated by one 
party, although there is probably, so far as 
can be judged from the press, just as much divi- 
sion of opinion as to poHtical matters as there 
ever was? As in the case of any other great 
fact of contemporaneous history, there are no 
doubt many causes; but one of them at least 
seems connected with the error already adverted 
to. The Democratic party assumed originally a 
comparatively simple task — that of democratiz- 
ing our institutions. To make suffrage uni- 
versal, and make all offices possible elective, and 
to have elections frequent, required no great 
genius, but chiefly the comprehension of a sim- 
ple contrivance, the extension of which they 
took to be a fundamental principle of popular 
government — by such means only could respon- 
sibility to the people be made effective. But 
all this was long ago accomplished, and it is now 
pretty clear that the principle is not fundamental 
— that the means supposed to be required by it 
really produce, not responsibihty, but the ma- 

^ When these lectures were delivered, "Bryanism" showed as 
yet no sign of waning. 



128 THE DEMOCRATIC MISTAKE 

chine and irresponsibility. And, accordingly, 
to-day the Democratic party is Httle more than 
an organization for the control and deHvery of 
votes. It cannot produce new ideas or get 
statesmen to lead it; its fundamental idea hav- 
ing been already discovered and expounded and 
applied and exhausted, there is nothing more to 
do. If it does not work as was expected, the 
party cannot abandon it and take some new one 
up. Consequently the followers of Jefferson are 
thrown into the arms of demagogues who tell 
them that there has been no mistake at all; that 
all that is needed is more democratization; as 
at first what was needed was democratization of 
the machinery for the operation of government, 
so now what is needed is democratization so- 
cially — the redistribution of wealth, the enforce- 
ment of equahty of condition, the abolition of 
poverty; in fact, exactly that sort of socialism 
which pohtical and economical doctrinaires have 
been preaching in France and Germany as the 
"next step." In this way the American De- 
mocracy, historically not only the "least gov- 
ernment," but the States' Rights party, has been 
led into its present ridiculous position of trying 
to outbid the demagogues of the party of cen- 



PATRONAGE AND THE MACHINE 129 

tralization in the advocacy of every sort of 
Federal government interference with individ- 
ual liberty and property, and espionage and 
confiscation of the goods of the rich, in the in- 
terest of a new "distribution" which will seem 
proper to the distributees. How an opposition 
party might be created was seen in the days of 
Tilden and Cleveland, who both, though origi- 
nally sharing the Democratic delusion that re- 
sponsibility to the people could only be enforced 
through elective machinery, came to perceive 
that the real result was to produce the machine, 
and that at that time the key to the irrespon- 
sible power of the machine was in its hold on 
the Federal civil service. Being men who could 
distinguish facts from phrases and ideas, they 
foresaw that the key to a new great democratic 
advance lay not in blindly injecting more suflFrage 
into the body politic, but in doing what had been 
done in England, abolishing one of the worst 
forms of privilege known — patronage in this 
service. They took up the "merit" system, 
which was really the property of neither party, 
and so long as they were in control the Demo- 
cratic party had leaders who were not tied 
bHndly to the past. But they left no heirs, and 



I30 THE DEMOCRATIC MISTAKE 

for twelve years the national Democratic party 
has been a machine worked for the benefit of a 
single man, who has fed his followers on the 
delusions and whims which are the legitimate 
products of a false theory of government. There 
could hardly be a more valuable illustration of 
the lasting and cohesive power of this curious 
kind of extra-political and irresponsible organi- 
zation than that it has actually maintained a 
totally unsuccessful leader at the head of a once 
great historical party for twelve years, and 
found means to supply itself with the sinews of 
war against the better judgment of larger and 
larger numbers of those who nominally sup- 
ported him. 

Of course, when the machine is spoken of as 
an irresponsible body, what is meant is that its 
agents and members as well as itself are ab- 
solutely unknown to the Constitution and laws. 
No one connected with it is made answerable for 
anything that he does, to any organ of the gov- 
ernment, and practically there may be said to 
be hardly any responsibility to public opinion 
or "censure," because the power of this incor- 
poreal body is so great as to be above it. But 
within the organization all is entirely different. 



PATRONAGE AND THE MACHINE 131 

Being an imperium in itself, the machinery of 
responsibility must be found in it, and it is easy 
to make out its nature. It is in one aspect the 
responsibiHty of obedience in return for nu- 
trition — the most binding and primitive form 
of responsibility known to man. What the 
"leader," the boss, the committeeman, really 
does for most of his followers is to provide them 
with meat and drink and clothes. Obey, and the 
machine will provide for you; disobey, and you 
will be left to yourself. But there is another tie 
in proper cases. Obey and you shall be given 
a career and honors. Do your work, whatever 
it may be, and the reward shall be honor and 
place. There is only one condition: you must 
be dumb and blind. The machine is a provi- 
dence to its followers. There are even further 
ties. In many places, for instance, the machine 
is able to get for its supporters wages which 
are above the prevailing rate, to see that trouble- 
some creditors are kept at bay, to look after its 
criminals when in trouble, and find bail for them. 
When we ask what is the power behind, we al- 
ways find it is **the organization," a creature 
not only with neither soul to be damned nor 
body to be punished, but without even legal 
identity or existence to be established. 



132 THE DEMOCRATIC MISTAKE 

The machine of a party not in control of the 
national offices is powerful; but its power is 
as nothing when compared with that of the 
machine in control throughout the country gen- 
erally. In offices held by administrative ap- 
pointment, rotation may come to a final end by 
civil-service reform and tenure during good be- 
havior, when these are permanently appHed to 
the whole administrative system, as they are in 
great measure now. But they are still in im- 
perfect operation; and civil-service reform does 
not affect rotation in elective offices, the centre 
of most of the intrigue and favoritism which 
now prevails. Few people understand to what 
extent this system of rotation has been carried. 
In every State where the elective system has 
been generally applied to offices formerly non- 
elective, and where elections are very frequent 
and elective machinery complex, the system is 
carried out to a remarkable degree of perfec- 
tion, and the vast body of candidates for local 
office is rotated into them and out of them, 
through its control of nominations, by the ma- 
chine, so that by diligence and constant work 
the meanest laborer in the field may aspire to 
high place. This system, of course, involves 
the absence of responsibility to anybody but 



PATRONAGE AND THE MACHINE 133 

the nominating power — to that power a tie of 
absolute submission. It must always be remem- 
bered that salaries, as well as the creation of 
offices, are in the hands of the legislature, and 
that the legislature is made up as far as is pos- 
sible of creatures of the machine. Thirty-five 
years ago volunteers used to go to Albany to 
argue before committees in favor of or against 
proposals of legislation. Now those who wish 
to influence legislation have private interviews 
in private rooms with the quiet men who con- 
trol the legislators. It is easy to see why this 
system tends to produce more and more offices, 
as it is by increasing the number of offices that 
the machine constantly increases its hold upon 
the party and through the party upon the gov- 
ernment. We used to ask ourselves what the 
ideal state will be. The ideal state under ma- 
chine government will be one in which every one 
who interests himself in politics may have the 
hope of fining, at any rate for a short time, some 
office, while in consequence all those who interest 
themselves in political work will have an interest 
in the constant increase of taxes; they will all 
be at the public table every day and the entire 
community will pay for the meal. The machine 



134 THE DEMOCRATIC MISTAKE 

ideal of democratic institutions is, in other 
words, the multiplication of offices and the dis- 
sipation of responsibiHty in them. The machine 
Utopia is entirely attainable. 

The machine is the ripe fruit in a popular 
government, where there is an enormous amount 
of money to spend, of the primal curse of all 
governments of kings and aristocracies — Patron- 
age.^ 

The machine not only enjoys irresponsible 
power itself, but through its control of nomi- 
nations it tends to destroy all responsibility in 



* Go back to the early part of the last century and you find in 
England, in the "rotten boroughs" and the control of places in the 
civil service, a corrupt system of patronage less secret, and con- 
sequently less effective. Favor or caprice were the grounds of 
appointment and made the tenure even of elective offices depend- 
ent on favor. It was through this system that the king was able 
to make the American war last for seven years, and all electoral 
reform was blocked until the reform bill of 1832. A political agent 
like Rigby bore a close resemblance to what we should call "an 
active organization man." So habituated had people become to 
it, it seemed to be an integral part of the government, and the 
Duke of Wellington asked pathetically, on finding that he could 
not withstand the tide of Parliamentary reform: "Then how is 
the King's government to be carried on?" When, later, it was 
for the first time proposed to abolish patronage in the civil service 
here, all the politicians who had made their way to power by aid 
of it protested that without patronage people would not perform 
their poHtical duties. It proved extremely difficult to get any- 
body to believe that people went to the polls from any but in- 
terested motives. 



PATRONAGE AND THE MACHINE 135 

ofEce, the very principle, that is, on which all 
government rests. The office-holder becomes 
responsible to it, while nominally answerable 
in the quarter designed by the scheme of gov- 
ernment. This we see every day in the legis- 
lature. The member is in theory answerable 
to his constituents. But he knows that in nine 
cases out of ten his constituents have nothing 
whatever to do with sending him to the legisla- 
ture or keeping him there, except through vot- 
ing for him or against ^him at the polls, and that 
the whole body of his party will vote for him ;f 
he gets the nomination of the machine. Know- 
ing this, the temptation is almost overwhelming 
to become a henchman of the organization, 
which practically means making a bargain with 
the person who controls it to take orders from 
him while in the legislature. Instead of being 
the representative of a popular constituency, he 
is the agent of the machine, and his continued 
tenure of office depends on his fidelity to it. 
This gives the machine the absolute control of 
the party vote, and legislation is either blocked 
or permitted to go through by arrangement with 
the head of the machine. This is the system 
which has taken the place of the old-fashioned 



136 THE DEMOCRATIC MISTAKE 

lobbying, which could not outlive the individual 
independence of members. The lobbyist for- 
merly had to approach members. He now deals 
with the patron of the members. During the 
Piatt regime at Albany this was understood to 
have greatly simplified the operation of gov- 
ernment. It has a great additional advantage 
in putting a stop to all tedious debate and dis- 
cussion. The member who expects to vote as he 
is told has no motive for debate or discussion. 
In State legislatures, the control obtained by 
the machine over the Speaker has been a most 
important step. The Speaker, formerly a ju- 
dicial officer, Hke the Speaker of the House of 
Commons, or the presiding officer of the Senate, 
has obtained almost autocratic power in the 
advancing or retarding of legislation. Given 
a thoroughly "harmonious" machine, and a 
speaker as its agent, the House of Representa- 
tives easily vies with the legislature at Albany. 
By "harmony" is always meant a blind and 
unscrupulous obedience of orders. 

The operation of the machine in executive 
offices, whenever these offices are elective, is, if 
anything, worse. The selectmen of a town, the 
trustees of a village, or any elective commission 



PATRONAGE AND THE MACHINE 137 

can easily be brought under its power, with the 
same, and sometimes worse, results. These 
bodies, in theory, are responsible in solido for 
the discharge of their duties. They are supposed 
to exercise jointly all the functions of their 
office, and to be answerable for the non-perform- 
ance of them. But this sort of responsibility is 
soon sapped. As soon as they find that what 
really keeps them in office is not answerability to 
the constituency but obedience to the orders of 
their nominators, they find it much easier to 
parcel out among themselves the duties of the 
office. For with the duties goes the patronage, 
and, for the proper disposition of this, the ma- 
chine needs individual responsibility to itself 
and must have it. Under this system one mem- 
ber may be given the roads, another the police, 
another sanitary matters, and the salaries of sub- 
ordinates or pay of employees in these different 
branches go to him also. He parcels these out 
in obedience to orders from above; the com- 
mission as a whole is responsible in theory to 
the constituency for the result, but in fact not 
to anybody; while each official gets renomi- 
nated or promoted if his behavior with regard 
to patronage, jobs, and pay is satisfactory to a 



138 THE DEMOCRATIC MISTAKE 

body which has no legal or responsible existence 
at all. 

Taking the government as a whole, the ma- 
chine is either locally or ubiquitously an im- 
perium in imperio which establishes, through 
its control over nominations, the responsibihty 
of the official to itself, and practically dispenses 
him from that responsibility to the people on 
which popular government alone can, in the long 
run, rest, and which we mistakenly believe to be 
enforced by perpetual elections. Its control 
over nominations is obtained through the com- 
plexity of the nominating system and the mul- 
tiplicity of elections, both of which have come 
from a mistaken idea that responsibility to the 
people can only be secured through elective ma- 
chinery and short terms of office. The electoral 
machine, as it now exists, is analogous to, though 
not exactly the same as, the "spoils system," 
which was developed in the Federal civil service 
through rotation. It could be estabhshed, worst 
of all, just as thoroughly in the judicial system, 
by making judicial terms very short, as well as 
making them elective. Fortunately we have 
been saved from this extreme in the Federal 
government by the tenure having been made 



PATRONAGE AND THE MACHINE 139 

that of good behavior, and in the State govern- 
ments by the fact that "judicial spoils" are 
not generally very rich. But in New York an 
approximation to machine judges has been 
made, and under Mr. Croker was quite success- 
ful. His testimony before the Mazet com^mittee 
has been often republished. He expected judges, 
he said, to act on the bench "as members of the 
party" and appoint Tammany referees, a very 
considerable part of the business of the courts 
being in the hands of referees. The following 
were some of the questions and answers : 

"Q. So we have it, then, that you, participat- 
ing in the selection of judges before election, 
participate in the emolument that comes away 
down at the end of their judicial proceeding, 
namely, in judicial sales? A. Yes, sir. 

"Q. And it goes into your pocket.^ A. I get 
— that is, a part of my profit. 

"Q. And the nomination of a judge on tlie 
Tammany Hall ticket in this city is almost 
equivalent to an election, is it not? A. Yes, sir. 

"Q. So that, if you have a controlling voice 
in the affairs of your party, and secure the nomi- 
nation of true men, you may be sure that at 
least in the real-estate exchange and in the firm 



I40 THE DEMOCRATIC MISTAKE 

of Meyer & Croker you will, as a true Demo- 
crat, get some of that patronage? A. We at 
least expect he will be friendly to us. 

"Q. And you get some of the patronage? 
A. We hope so. 

"Q. Then you are working for your own 
pocket, are you not? A. All the time." 

The following is an account of county ma- 
chinery taken from a leading Massachusetts 
newspaper, analyzing a report by the Boston 
Finance Commission: 

"The political system has had an unrestricted 
field in county affairs. It has not been subject 
to the check of the civil-service rules. Under 
the Massachusetts system of county adminis- 
tration, the county organization is a law unto 
itself, answerable only to the electorate at annual 
elections, at which time it is seldom found neces- 
sary to offer detailed explanations. In counties 
other than Suffolk, county commissions have 
built up machines, sometimes independent and 
sometimes in connection with other important 
political influences. 'County Rings' are no- 
torious as dominant political factors, and some- 
times as profligate spenders of the people's 
money for poHtical ends. Occasionally condi- 



PATRONAGE AND THE MACHINE 141 

tions have become noxious and reforms have 
been demanded and secured. But, as a rule, 
the poHtical power of the county organization 
has been used to make that power self-per- 
petuating. 

"In Suffolk County the powers of the county 
commission have been vested in the city coun- 
cil of Boston. The county has been a useful 
political adjunct to the municipal machine. 
Extensive as has been the field for political 
manipulation offered by the ramifications of the 
municipal administration, it has not been equal 
to the demands made upon it by the politicians. 
The county, with its annual expenditure of 
^1,000,000, subject to no review save that 
which the city council might make, has offered 
a rare opportunity for the payment of political 
debts. The finance commission indicates clearly 
how this has been done. Appropriations are 
made upon estimates furnished by the city 
auditor. His sources of information, furnishing 
the basis for such estimates, are the requests of 
certain county officials or the expenditures of 
previous years. It is not apparent that needs 
and desires are ever compared to determine 
the accuracy of estimates. Methods of expend- 



142 THE DEMOCRATIC MISTAKE 

ing appropriations are seldom watched or made 
a subject of inquiry. There is no check upon the 
increase of salaries or the creation of new offices. 
In twelve years the number of employees has 
more than doubled, with similar increases in 
salaries. Log-rolling methods have increased 
salaries ^82,202.33 in four years. The system 
has been a standing invitation to trades with 
members of the Boston board of aldermen for 
positions for favorites in exchange for county 
positions. County officials, if not willing parties 
to such trades, have been held up with threats 
of reduced appropriations 

"The application of civil-service laws to 
county administration, the creation of a series 
of checks upon and reviews of county expendi- 
tures, and the requirement of actual estimates 
of need as a basis for appropriations, as suggested 
by the finance commission, will accomplish some 
reforms. Mayor Hibbard's prompt summons to 
the committee on county accounts may be of 
some avail. But the interests of the taxpayers 
in other counties, as well as in Suffolk, require 
that some far-reaching reorganization of the 
system of county administration be effected." 

Such is the county machine in one State as 



PATRONAGE AND THE MACHINE 143 

described by the Finance Commission. It is 
merely one individual of a species. 

Dissipationof responsibility is a more elaborate 
and artistic contrivance than multiplication of 
offices. I do not know whether I have made this 
point entirely plain. In an industrial State in 
which a vast amount of money is spent on public 
works of all kinds, patronage does not mean 
merely offices, but money paid out under con- 
tract. Now, there is no doubt that division of 
responsibility promotes the disbursement of 
money in a great number of ways. If there is a 
board of four men who have the disbursement of 
a milHon, so long as they act as a body, and each 
is under a real political responsibility for the 
other, they are not likely to be wasteful. But 
if you divide the responsibility and give to each 
member of the board the spending of $250,000, 
with the understanding that what one does all 
do, it is surprising how fast the money will dis- 
appear. Thus, one of the natural results of a 
division of spoils is a dissipation of responsibility. 
It is obvious that each member of the board is 
entitled to patronage to the extent of $250,000, 
and when it is what is called a bi-partisan 
board, in no other way can the party balance be 



144 THE DEMOCRATIC MISTAKE 

maintained. So dissipation of responsibility is 
born of patronage. By carrying the matter a 
little further and establishing what is graphically 
termed a "rake-ofF," expenditure may be still 
further accelerated; but we must be careful not 
to go too far, for we are touching on delicate 
ground; prudent "organization men" are care- 
ful never to expose themselves to the charge 
of a breach of the criminal law. A failure to 
notice the importance of this rule has given 
members of some ''rings" much trouble; en- 
lightened politicians, as can be seen by the 
testimony of Mr. Croker, quoted above, have 
learned how to enjoy the fruits of corruption 
without the risk of indictment. Their protected 
system has enriched the language with an illu- 
minating phrase, "honest graft." The machine 
allots the offices and provides the votes which 
decide who shall fill them, and this it does upon 
a tacit understanding that it is to have an 
interest in the distribution of the patronage. 
Translate this into terms of contract and day's 
labor, and you will see at once why the cities 
and local public works supply the life blood of 
the electoral machine of our day, exactly as the 
custom-houses and the navy-yards and the post- 



PATRONAGE AND THE MACHINE 145 

office and the federal departments made the 
federal civil service a by-word a generation 
ago. 

Details of machine misgovernment are as 
various as those of the government on which it 
preys, and it is idle to attempt a study of them 
except with power from the state to *'send for 
persons and papers." Its work is secret and 
the secrets are not told, because secrecy is one 
of the sources of its power. There are rings, 
and rings within rings. Then, too, a machine 
powerful to-day may disintegrate to-morrow, 
owing to the death or retirement of its head. 
In the perfected machine, however, of which 
Tammany is the type, this never occurs. Tam- 
many without a boss is as impossible as a king- 
dom without a king. Business is managed as 
it was at Rome, through popular forms, the 
mayor, the presidents of the boroughs, the legis- 
lative body (which passes no laws); but the 
process is arranged by the head and his real co- 
adjutors behind closed doors. The results we 
know, and are not in the dark as to cause and 
effect. Mutatis mutandis, it is the same in all 
machine-governed territory. The state machine 
is not different in kind, but it has a different 



146 THE DEMOCRATIC MISTAKE 

field of operations. What a state machine exists 
for may be seen in the struggle of Governor 
Hughes with the New York machine. Governor 
Hughes announced himself as opposed to sham 
responsibiUty, to a dissipation of responsibility. 
"I am the responsible Executive of my State," 
this extraordinarily obstinate man declared, 
"made so by the Constitution. To whom am 
I responsible? Can I be so for power which 
others control .f^'' This is called "kicking over 
the traces." 

The merit system in this country, though not 
yet completely introduced, has, as far as the civil 
service is concerned, paved the way for dislodg- 
ing the electoral machine. When all the fourth- 
class postmasters, who are the principal remains 
of the old system, are brought within the new, 
and the system has stood the test of a change of 
parties, patronage will play no more part in this 
service, and government clerks will be no more 
bled for election expenses here than they are 
in England. The civil service of the government 
will have been taken out of "politics" and 
placed on the basis on which any successful 
private business is carried on. And what is 
true of the federal civil service is also true of the 



PATRONAGE AND THE MACHINE 147 

civil-service system in States and cities, so far 
as it is applied. 

But supposing the civil service to be entirely 
free from patronage to-day, the electoral nom- 
inating machine would be still in operation 
throughout the whole elective system, and the 
problem now before us is whether we can find 
a means of getting rid of that. For, if there is 
anything in the teachings of experience, the ma- 
chine as it exists to-day is as full of poison as 
the civil service ever was. 

If the view of the subject which I have at- 
tempted to outline be correct, there is no way to 
get rid of the machine except through giving up 
the delusion that the multiplication of offices 
and elections is the way to enforce responsibility 
to the people or that they can do anything but 
intensify the evil. We have got to retrace our 
steps and face the fact that popular government 
can get responsibility only through a very spar- 
ing use of elective machinery, and by relying 
mainly on tenure, responsibility centred in a 
single head, and emoluments of office adequate 
to make it attractive to the best and most fit. 
In other words, the road to good government 
lies through the simplification of political ma- 



148 THE DEMOCRATIC MISTAKE 

chinery. If any one says that this is a dream 
of perfection, I emphatically deny it, and advise 
those who think it so to read the history of the 
struggles by which the civil-service law was 
introduced and what was accompHshed in the 
teeth of the indifference or jeers of a great part 
of the press, and the bitter and obstinate op- 
position of almost every leading politician in 
the country, by the efforts of three men, one 
of whom was the writer in whose honor this 
chair was founded. 

The evils of machine government are pretty 
generally recognized, as is the necessity of doing 
something about them. The current remedies 
proposed may be said to come under two heads. 

First, the popular election of senators, on the 
theory that the election by the legislature (the 
latter being more or less in the hands of the ma- 
chine) produces senators who are the creatures 
of the machine — ^who hold their offices at its 
pleasure and are not really responsible to the 
State sending them to Washington. This reform 
requires a constitutional amendment, though 
the difficulty may for the time be got over by 
any State legislature, which wishes to introduce 
the change, binding itself to send to Washington 



PATRONAGE AND THE MACHINE 149 

any candidate who appears by a preliminary vote 
to have the majority of the party vote behind 
him. 

Second, the direct primary is advocated, i. e., 
direct voting in the primary for candidates, 
thus doing away with the delegate convention, 
which is now usually the scene of the most de- 
cisive operations of the machine. 

Both these reforms are open to the criticism 
that they are founded upon the idea with ref- 
erence to democratic machinery which I have 
ventured to call the democratic mistake; that 
is, that whenever and under whatever cir- 
cumstances you want to secure responsibihty 
to the people, the only way is by a popular 
vote. 

If this view is correct, we might expect to find 
that the proposed reforms, so far as they have 
been introduced, have not proved entirely satis- 
factory, and that seems to be the case. I find 
the plan of direct nominations thus summed up 
in a quarter very unfriendly to machine govern- 
ment: 

Direct nominations are still in the experi- 
mental stage. In Mississippi, Georgia, South 
Carolina, and elsewhere in the South, complaint 



I50 THE DEMOCRATIC MISTAKE 

is made that the Populists vote at the Demo- 
cratic primaries and that by holding the balance 
of power between two Democratic factions they 
can often dictate the Democratic nominations, 
which are equivalent to an election. 

In Missouri this year, although a majority of 
the Democratic legislators favor Folk for Sena- 
tor, Stone had a pluraHty in the popular vote 
and will succeed himself. In this case, the pri- 
mary system of selecting Senators has accom- 
plished the exact opposite of what its friends 
claimed for it. 

In Oregon a RepubHcan legislature is asked 
to elect a Democratic United States Senator 
because Governor Chamberlain was success- 
ful at the State senatorial election. In Wis- 
consin the charge is made that Senator Stephen- 
son's victory was won by the use of money. 
Michigan and Illinois have proved that the 
machine, under the primary system can retain 
the advantage it had under the convention 
system, and in Michigan both Republican fac- 
tions charged gross irregularities in the vote for 
Governor. 

The direct primary means two elections, one 
of which has to be paid for by the candidates 
themselves. This makes it very difficult for a 
poor man to gain a nomination unless he happens 
to have an overwhelming personal popularity or 
a rich backer. If left to his own resources he 
cannot pay the heavy expenses of the prelimi- 
nary canvass, which involves railroad fare, hotel 
bills, hall rent, advertising, etc. In the recent 



PATRONAGE AND THE MACHINE 151 

Detroit election it was estimated that the pri- 
maries cost the various candidates no less than 
^250,000. 

A nominating S3^stem under which men Hke 
Woodruff, Barnes, Ward, Connors, Murphy, and 
McCarren can name the candidate is bad; yet 
nothing will be gained if the State substitutes a 
system which means practically two elections 
and still leaves the control of nominations in the 
hands of the bosses. 

In other words, the system is more compli- 
cated than the old, which it is introduced to 
simplify.^ 

In the early city states of Greece, the people 
managed everything directly through a popular 
vote. But whatever virtues the principle had in 
it when in use in very small communities, it has 
absolutely failed to work in large communities, 
and to judge by our own experience the direct 
primary will have the fate that the convention 
system itself had — it will at first tend to pop- 
ularize nominations — that is, make them more 
accessible to popular influence — but later on it 
will, through its complexity, increase the power 
of the machine. The fundamental difficulty will 
always be that no one but the professional poli- 

^ I do not see anything in the presidential campaign of 1912 to 
call for any modification of this view. 



152 THE DEMOCRATIC MISTAKE 

ticians and their henchmen, the "workers," have 
the time to devote to picking out candidates 
and organizing the forces of the party. The in- 
evitable result is that these professionals and 
workers do these things while the others pay the 
expenses. 

As already suggested, it is in another quarter, 
according to my belief, that we must look for 
signs of improvement. Responsibility to the 
people does not necessarily mean, so far as the 
actual operation of the government goes, re- 
sponsibiHty at short intervals to a popular vote. 
It means answerabiHty somewhere for the per- 
formance of the duties imposed by the people 
upon the incumbent, tested solely by the result. 
Now this responsibility is not increased by any 
increase in the number of officials; and it is 
greatly diminished by the frequency of elections, 
and in the shortening of the terms of office. On 
the other hand, responsibility increases with a 
reduction in the number of officials and elections, 
and the lengthening of the term of office. The 
same causes which produce one or other of these 
effects increase or diminish respectively the 
power of the machine by taking away from it its 
occupation. If all the powers of the government 



PATRONAGE AND THE MACHINE 153 

of the State of New York were, after full discus- 
sion, vested in a commission of five men for ten 
years, by a popular vote, it is obvious that dur- 
ing this time the State machine would find its 
occupation gone. This is an extreme case, but 
it is an illustration showing the direction in 
which alone the powers of the machine can be 
successfully undermined. 

It is in quarters in which the operation of the 
machine is most vicious and oppressive that one 
might expect to see the first signs of some effec- 
tive contrivance to counteract it. This is con- 
spicuously the case with city government. A 
triumphant Tammany Hall would represent the 
destruction of popular government. The same 
system is at work everywhere, but it is only 
within recent years that the disease and its 
causes have been studied. The result has been 
the discovery that the worst of the malady lay 
in the complexity introduced by exclusive re- 
liance on frequent elections to secure responsi- 
bihty, and the only remedy hitherto tried with 
any success has been a substitution for the old 
municipal regime, with its wards, and districts, 
and councilmen, aldermen, and mayor, of govern- 
ment by a single-headed commission; that is, 



154 THE DEMOCRATIC MISTAKE 

turning over the city bodily to a small body of 
men vested with most of the powers of govern- 
ment, but subject to the power which clothes 
them with these powers — that is, the commu- 
nity itself. This has as yet been tried thoroughly 
only in some comparatively small cities, but the 
nature of the cure is not dependent on the size 
of the city. 

The history of the government of the City of 
New York during the last fifty years is that of a 
struggle, on the one hand, to simplify the gov- 
ernment of the chief commercial city of the 
country by lengthening tenure — the mayor has 
now a tenure as long as that of the president of 
the United States — through making responsi- 
bility in heads of executive departments single 
instead of divided, wherever possible; by increas- 
ing salaries, by getting the city civil service out 
of politics, and making its tenure depend upon 
merit; on the other hand, to strengthen the 
hold of the machine through the legislature at 
Albany and through a rigid control of nomina- 
tions. The legislative control at Albany has, 
of course, always complicated and still greatly 
complicates the problem. 



LECTURE V 
LIMITATIONS 



LIMITATIONS 

The theory of checks and balances has fallen 
into discredit, partly because it has been mis- 
understood; partly because it has not worked 
altogether as was expected; partly also because 
the study of the operation of government as a 
human contrivance for the attainment of defi- 
nite ends by means of the deliberate use of will 
and motive has been in a sort of eclipse; partly 
owing in this country to the mistaken idea that 
we had solved the problem of popular govern- 
ment once for all by means of continuous uni- 
versal suffrage. Now that it is beginning to be 
perceived that this tends to produce cumbrous 
and irresponsible government, and to pervert 
popular into machine government, interest in 
the subject seems likely to be revived. 

Checks and balances are as old as Athens and 
Rome, and are founded on a very simple prin- 
ciple which is as old as government itself. The 
principle is that in public affairs the love of 
power is a constant motive to increase "power; that 

157 



158 THE DEMOCRATIC MISTAKE 

power always tends, unchecked, to become un- 
limited, or, in other words, arbitrary; and hence 
to check it some counterbalancing tendency 
must be called into play. 

Writers on government, in this case as in so 
many others, have no doubt pressed a familiar 
tendency too far. It is not true as a universal 
principle that all power succeeds in aggrandiz- 
ing itself. There are many familiar instances of 
power which with time has grown less. The 
f atria potestas, which was a primitive absolute 
dominion of the father as the head of the family, 
including power of Hfe and death, has dwindled 
until, even in countries deriving their laws from 
Rome, it is hardly more than a mild control 
carefully supervised by the courts. It was once 
thought to be the duty of a good judge to ** am- 
plify" his jurisdiction. Such a practice now 
would be with us an impeachable offence. The 
temporal power of the Catholic Church, after 
expanding and increasing for centuries, has come 
down to very modest proportions. In these 
cases, other causes have been brought into play 
to counteract the tendency. Irresponsible and 
uncontrolled power always tends to increase and 
extend itself, for the simple reason that it is irre- 



LIMITATIONS 159 

sponsible. A priori it must do so, because the 
desire of human beings for power is inimitable 
and, like any other passion, grows by what it 
feeds on. Experience teaches the same lesson 
in the history of every despotism, and of every 
mob, once free from the control of law, and of 
every unfettered aristocracy. Make the pos- 
sessor of the power responsible for his acts, and 
enforce the responsibihty by practicable means, 
and the tendency to expansion is stopped, and 
either the power remains constant — as, for in- 
stance, in the case in this country of the ordinary 
judicial power — or even may, under the influ- 
ence of other causes, diminish. 

In all popular governments it is considered de- 
sirable to control the tendency to aggrandize- 
ment, and it may be done in two ways: first, 
that which we have been considering, making 
the person who exercises the power responsible, 
i.e., answerable, for its abuse; second, by limit- 
ing the power itself in some way. One of the 
most obvious ways of doing it is that suggested 
by nature and history, i. e., the opposition to it 
of some other power which will balance it and 
hold it in check. As in the early world, and in- 
deed down to very recent times, there always 



i6o THE DEMOCRATIC MISTAKE 

appeared to be three mighty forms which po- 
litical power took, engaged in an endless struggle 
for the mastery, it seemed fair to infer that a 
true function of each might be to hold in check 
the other two, and this result was thought to 
have been reached in the English constitution, 
in a nice balance between the Crown, the Aris- 
tocracy, and the People. Unfortunately, if the 
balance is established by accidental causes, and 
not by design, it may be very unstable. If it is 
only a fortuitous balance between class interests, 
there is no reason why one class interest should 
not swallow up another. At any rate, this is 
what has happened in England, the House of 
Commons having encroached until it and the 
electorate behind it have destroyed the balance 
and estabhshed what English writers like Maine 
hold to be a close approach to simple democracy. 
The complaint is constantly heard in England 
now, that our constitution is more conservative 
than theirs. In American governments the 
theory of the balance between the three forms 
of government was out of place, because their 
whole framework rested on the sovereignty of 
the people, and a much more elaborate system 
of limitations was set up than any hitherto 



LIMITATIONS i6i 

dreamed of. It involves not merely the inde- 
pendence of the three departments, which are 
balanced against each other, but the balance of 
the States against the Federal government, and 
the executive against the Senate, the Senate 
against the House. Supreme above all is put the 
judiciary, which limits all power, though in itself 
having none except what the executive must 
furnish; all judicial decrees and judgments be- 
ing carried into effect by some branch of the 
executive. 

In this scheme may be seen the germ of a new 
principle till recently not hitherto much con- 
sidered, but destined apparently to rise to great 
importance. Translate the old dispute between 
Monarchy, Aristocracy, and Democracy into the 
terms of modern industrial society as we know 
it, without heredity, privilege, or prescription of 
any kind, and what does it become .f* In the 
answer to this question, I think, lies an explana- 
tion of much of the ferocious criticism formerly 
directed against the Federalists as **monarch- 
ists. 

The FederaHsts differed from the RepubHcans 
and leaders like Jefferson in taking a purely 
practical view of government, untinged by sen- 



i62 THE DEMOCRATIC MISTAKE 

tlmentallty or speculation; most of them were 
men of affairs, and in many cases large property 
owners, accustomed to the management of men 
and business. In their eyes the old dispute, as 
suggested in the last lecture, came to have 
another meaning, i. e., What functions of this 
government will best be discharged by one man ? 
What by a few men? What by many? What 
by this branch of the government, what by 
that? Put in this way, the answer was neces- 
sarily: That depends on the nature of the func- 
tion. 

Now upon analysis it turns out that the most 
conspicuous functions which we call executive, 
and which in the older world were vested in an 
hereditary king, were vested in him, not wholly 
by accident, but also because they were of the 
kind to be performed by one man. The kingly 
office answered for ages, because, as we should 
say, it constituted a strong executive. The ju- 
dicial office, which the Athenians vested in a 
multitude, experience shows to be best exercised 
by experts in law, few in number; the judiciary 
the founders of the American State accordingly 
made a select body. The problem as to the 
legislature and the electorate they left where 



LIMITATIONS 163 

they found it — in the hands of the many, gov- 
erning by representation.^ 

What the American Federal Constitution did 
was really to introduce to the modern world a 
new view of the whole subject, which may be 
summed up by saying that in the operation of 
government all contrivances are designed, among 
other things, to answer the questions: In what 
functions of government is the action of one 

* In Europe the struggle of the three forms continued for two 
generations; as late as the middle of the last century it was still 
believed that the one potent cause which explained all the phe- 
nomena of politics was the form of government. To put the 
matter in a different way, it is not merely the fact that the sover- 
eignty may be in the hands of one man, or a few men, or of the 
general body of the community, that is important; it is a vital 
fact also that every function of government is performed either 
by one man, or by a few men, or a large number. This is not the 
difference between monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy, but 
a practical question of observation and experience. Experience 
shows, for instance, that the responsibility of a court for the trial 
of cases is usually at its best if it consists of one judge, but this 
does not make a trial court consisting of a trial judge a mon- 
archical institution. A court of appeal always is made to consist of 
a number of judges, but this does not make even the Supreme 
Court at Washington a privileged aristocracy. Our executive is 
one man (we might have had two, as they had consuls at Rome); 
but this does not make him a king. The test is in the sovereignty. 
If that is popular, i. e., if the effective power of initiating, carrying 
on, and changing lies in the people, then you have a republic. But, 
under all forms of government, certain functions will be found to 
work in the same way, and to fall naturally into the hands of one, 
a few, or many. To take an extreme instance, from time im- 
memorial the regular representative of a country abroad has 
been a single man. It is almost proverbial that three men or two 



1 64 THE DEMOCRATIC MISTAKE 

man best ? How long shall power be held ? How 
shall responsibility be secured? In what func- 
tions by that of a few men ? In what by that of 
many? The Republicans made out only that a 
constitutional president was a Federalist sub- 
stitute for a king, and denounced their oppo- 
nents as ''monarchists." 

But the system would not be complete with- 
out some contrivance to set limits to the bound- 
men cannot do it as well, if at all; this was tried at the time of 
the Revolution and was a signal failure. On the other hand, the 
work of legislation has always in the long run been found to re- 
quire a numerous body; because what is needed in a legislature 
or constitutional convention is representation and debate, for 
debate, it must always be remembered, is a function of govern- 
ment just as much as action. Experience shows that the head of 
an army must be one man; a council of war never fights. These 
questions in early times were not studied nor attended to; ten 
generals for an army was not in Greece thought an absurdity. 
One reason why the battle between the three forms raged so hotly 
from the time of the revival of learning almost to the present day 
was, if I am right, purely intellectual. It was really believed that 
the form of government was a decisive cause which produced bad 
or good government of itself. Believers in a Monarchy or Aris- 
tocracy looked upon Democracy once adopted as a thing fatal to 
whatever was worth preserving in the State, and vice versa. 
But behind this there was the fact that the principle of heredity 
in privilege, which was practically universalover Europe, was really 
an abridgment of freedom, and the question of the form of gov- 
ernment was confounded with this. It was not until privilege 
as the basis of society was finally driven off the field by equality 
of opportunity, and universal suffrage recognized as the power 
behind the throne of the common welfare, that it was suddenly 
perceived that the old struggle of the three forms belonged to the 
past. 



LIMITATIONS 165 

aries of the powers delegated to one man, to a 
few men, and to the many; and this contrivance 
was found in the relation of the judiciary to the 
other two; and that they might perform this 
novel function, never before deliberately in- 
trusted to huma'n beings, they were given a ten- 
ure of office for life, so that they are to-day the 
permanent and supreme part of our system, 
outlasting presidents, and governors, and con- 
gresses, and legislatures. 

It is a commonplace of American constitu- 
tional law that the federal government is one of 
delegated powers. Had this merely meant that 
the States had created a federal political agency 
and devolved upon it powers which they might 
otherwise have exercised themselves and might 
at any time resume, there would have been little 
that was new in the contrivance, for, as I have 
endeavored to show, all government which is 
not carried on by a single person or persons in 
supreme power with their own hands must be 
delegated. Wherever there are political agents, 
judicial, legislative, or administrative, the power 
they exercise is delegated to them. Represen- 
tation is only a peculiar and refined form of dele- 
gation; its importance lies, not in its being a 



1 66 THE DEMOCRATIC MISTAKE 

novel discovery that A, B, and C can transact 
political business through D, their agent, at a 
distance, but that through this contrivance the 
whole legislative business of a community can 
be transacted at a distant centre through elec- 
tive machinery, thus making free institutions 
possible throughout immense areas and for great 
populations — in primitive times an almost in- 
conceivable idea. That representation is at bot- 
tom only a kind of delegation is seen only too 
clearly to-day in the fact that, owing, among 
other causes, to the extraordinary facilities for 
communication, representatives tend to become 
mere delegates, acting under instructions from 
their constituents without liberty of choice. 

In the government of the United States, the 
peculiarity lying behind the phrase, "a govern- 
ment of delegated powers," is the one just ad- 
verted to — that our Constitution leaves it to the 
judicial power to interpret the instrument con- 
ferring the powers and determine how far they 
extend. This is perhaps our greatest contribu- 
tion to the development of free institutions, and 
it is a contrivance practically unknown to the 
experience of the rest of the world. It is em- 
bodied in our State constitutions also, and it is 



LIMITATIONS 167 

what gives, under our system, their great im- 
portance and authority to the courts, placing 
them, for the single purpose of maintaining the 
limits of power in the Constitution, above the 
executive and above the legislature. That this 
was the necessary effect of the Constitution as 
adopted was foreseen and explained by Hamil- 
ton, and the device was entrenched in our sys- 
tem by Marshall. Though in a long view of 
history it is still only an experiment, it has sur- 
vived the storms of a century, and, if we may 
judge by what is going on about us, is in full 
vigor to-day. When we reflect on the previous 
subordination of the judicial power to the 
Crown, the genius of the men who grasped the 
possibihty of using it in this way stands out 
conspicuously. The judiciary is the weakest of 
all the departments of the government. It pos- 
sesses no physical force of its own and relies on 
the executive, the very department to which it 
had hitherto always been subservient, for phys- 
ical power to compel obedience to its decrees. 
What it cannot compel it can only obtain by the 
appeal to reason and law which its judgments 
make. That Hamilton should have perceived 
that an independent, responsible, and pure bench 



1 68 THE DEMOCRATIC MISTAKE 

would in the long run command the compliance 
of the executive and the legislature, and that in 
this way the fundamental law would be supreme, 
under circumstances far different from any that 
could then have been foreseen, is a memorable 
illustration of insight into the motives which de- 
termine the operation of government. Recall the 
circumstances, for instance, which surrounded 
the fierce and prolonged struggle between An- 
drew Johnson and Congress, following on the 
heels of a long civil war, which had enormously 
inflated for the time the powers of the executive, 
or those which recently marked the onslaught 
made at the same time by pubHc bodies on the 
elementary rights of property.^ When this was 
at its height and a decision imposing a fine of 
twenty-nine millions had been reversed by a 
federal court of appeal, one of the judges was 
asked what view he took of executive expres- 
sions of disapproval, and was reported to have 
said in substance: Expressions of opinion on the 
subject by the President do not concern me. 
He has his own department of the government 
to administer; I have mine. What he thinks of 

^ The settled rule that neither Congress nor the State legis- 
lature can, under pretence of regulation, pass measures of confis- 
cation is enforceable solely through the courts. 



LIMITATIONS 169 

our interpretation of the law is of no con- 
sequence, because our interpretation of the law 
is. the law itself. This judge's opinion has been 
reaffirmed. The President's lease of power has 
run out. 

This contrivance, then, is our fundamental 
limitation of the powers of government, and it 
is a balanced limitation. It checks and limits 
the legislature and the executive, while it does 
not tend to encroachment, because the judiciary 
depends for its power on the executive, and for 
its credit mainly on the persuasiveness of its 
judgments. The Dred Scott decision, for in- 
stance, did not persuade; the result was disas- 
trous to the Supreme Court as then constituted. 

The amount of good that the wisest govern- 
ments have done in their attempts to amelior- 
ate the condition of mankind is calculable; what 
is incalculable and almost beyond the reach of 
the imagination is the vast power for harm that 
the agency of irresponsible power wields. So 
prosperous has our own condition been that we 
have almost forgotten the past history of the 
world; but the innate power and potency of 
government for evil, like that of man, is what it 
always has been. The power to tax, it has been 



I70 THE DEMOCRATIC MISTAKE 

very truly said by one of our greatest judges, is 
the power to destroy, but the same thing may 
be said of almost all the powers of government. 
Except so far as they are restrained by human 
enlightenment and contrivance, the power of de- 
struction is inherent in every form of govern- 
ment, democracies, aristocracies, and despot- 
isms. 

To curb, restrain, and Hmit this fatal power 
has been the great effort of man as he has become 
civilized, and we are all familiar with the prin- 
ciples of common right and freedom which gov- 
ernments have gradually and with the greatest 
difficulty been forced to admit. Governments 
in which they are admitted and acted upon we 
call free and constitutional governments. So 
slowly has the work been done, such repeated 
lapses into barbarism have there been, so tre- 
mendous has been the resurgent power of brute 
political force in the hands of ignorance, super- 
stition, and cruelty, that it is only within the last 
one hundred and fifty years that we have be- 
come reasonably secure in our right to move 
about and change our place of abode freely, in 
our right to carry on our correspondence with- 
out its being opened, in our right to be exempt 



LIMITATIONS 171 

from having soldiers quartered on our families 
in time of profound peace and from having our 
houses searched for the purpose of making up a 
case against us, in our right to publish freely 
our opinions on public affairs. And, generally 
speaking, all these gains have been made solely 
through changes in public opinion and the law, 
and as they have been made so they may be 
taken away again by other means. There is as 
much potential tyranny in a popular govern- 
ment as in any other. 

Legal limitation of power by human design 
itself is therefore an important addition to the 
theory of constitutional government, and as its 
principle is applicable to any power, it is natural 
to find it applied here in ways never before 
dreamed of. At the time of the formation of 
the Constitution, one power greatly dreaded was 
that of the legislature, and this was limited by 
the veto^ in one direction (that is, of course, an 
instance of the use of the power of the executive 
to hold the legislature in check) and by several 
direct Hmitations of power intended to be en- 
forced by the judiciary, e.g., prohibiting the sus- 

^ The post-adjournment veto, as used in the State of New York, 
has been the means of killing hundreds, if not thousands, of cor- 
rupt or useless measures. 



172 THE DEMOCRATIC MISTAKE 

pension of the habeas corpus; prohibiting bills of 
attainder, and ex post facto laws; prohibiting any 
protective system between the States; prohibit- 
ing States from entering into relations with for- 
eign powers, coining money, impairing the obli- 
gation of contracts; prohibiting Congress from 
interfering with the free exercise of religion, or 
establishing any religion, or from abridging the 
freedom of the press, of speech, and of assembly 
and petition, or from depriving any person of 
life, liberty, or property without due process of 
law. Whether in the long run such limitations 
can outride the storms of executive or popular 
passion depends upon whether there is a power 
always at hand to enforce them. The South 
Americans, too, introduce "guarantees," as they 
call them, of the same sort into their constitu- 
tions; but they are not enforced by the courts, 
and are consequently not enforced at all except 
when it is considered advisable by the executive. 
They may be suspended by proclamation. 

The system of limitations formally introduced 
to the world by the Federalist has been our sys- 
tem of government ever since, but has been 
much extended. One of the most familiar in- 
stances is the adoption of the fourteenth amend- 



LIMITATIONS 173 

ment after the Civil War, by which the States 
are forbidden to deprive any person of Hfe, 
li-berty, or property without due process of law, 
as Congress had been forbidden to do the same 
thing by the fifth amendment. The original 
scheme of operation has been little changed, but 
in the States, where amendments are more easily 
passed, the powers of the State legislatures have 
been limited in a very remarkable way by taking 
away their power of special legislation, with a 
view to preventing the grant of special privi- 
leges to corporations or individuals. Another 
important modern kind of limitation is that 
which restricts States, towns, counties, and 
cities from incurring debt beyond a certain 
limit. 

On the whole, it cannot be said that the sys- 
tem has worked for anything but good; does it 
go far enough ^ We have not made it impossible 
for States to repudiate their debts, and we have 
not Hmited the power of Congress to do count- 
less wrongs without redress, which in England 
and on the continent are remedied by an 
ordinary law suit against the government itself. 
We have not broken up the absurd system by 
which legislative committees decide disputed 



174 THE DEMOCRATIC MISTAKE 

elections in the party interest — in England this 
is handed over to the courts — and we have not 
brought to an end the scandal of private bill 
legislation, but the fault in these cases is ours. 
We do not choose to cure the evil. 

Now, there are three points with regard to 
this which seem to deserve attention. One is 
that all these checks and balances and limita- 
tions are devices for curbing that irresponsibil- 
ity in the discharge of functions confided to 
political agents, which, as we have seen, it is the 
misfortune of our institutions to tend at other 
points to promote. Universal suffrage finds it 
difficult to get together a legislature such as our 
government theoretically demands — that is, an 
assembly of distinguished, responsible repre- 
sentatives — and finding itself confronted with 
an irresponsible body limits their power to do 
mischief by resort to the judiciary. By this 
means the limitation is enforced and responsibil- 
ity, so far as it can be, secured. 

The second is that a check on the irresponsible 
power of one department by means of another 
becomes worthless the moment the second de- 
partment becomes itself irresponsible, and this 
it may become either through usurpation or sub- 



LIMITATIONS 175 

servience. The judiciary with us has shown 
little or no tendency to usurpation, but it may 
in 'the future be made subservient. Judges are 
continually urged to develop the constitution by 
interpretation, and have even been exhorted 
to resort to what is called *' sociology," so that 
laws otherwise unconstitutional may be passed 
without any dread of their being set aside. In 
other words, the suggestion is that we should 
introduce a totally new system of government 
by means wholly illegal — the Constitution hav- 
ing provided for any such change only by way 
of amendment. The objection to this is that it 
makes Congress supreme and destroys the limi- 
tation by which the courts are set above the 
legislature.^ 

^ When these lectures were delivered, the suggestion that courts 
may be made subservient to Congress and the executive by means 
of the "recall" of judges, or decisions, had attracted little atten- 
tion. The objection to the "recall" of judges by popular vote 
is that it is a blow at the individual independence of the judge. 
A judge subject to such a process is less independent than if his 
tenure of office is dependent on the machine; for his dismissal 
may be by sudden whim, while even a judge who has secured his 
nomination from a "boss," holds at least till his term runs out, 
or until he is removed for cause, e. g., by impeachment. If the 
recall or dismissal is to be by the legislature, such a dismissal is 
practically provided for already in existing constitutions, by an 
orderly representative procedure. The difficulty with the recall 
of decisions is that it is founded on a confusion between a judicial 
decision or judgment, and the opinion of a court. A judicial de- 



176 THE DEMOCRATIC MISTAKE 

The third and most important point is that 
this system hinges upon the integrity and au- 
thority of the judiciary, and is good or bad as 
the judiciary is good or bad. Hence, it ap- 

cision or judgment is generally an order, or command, that some- 
thing be done or not done; e. g., that a man be arrested, that his 
property be sold; that possession of land or other property be 
delivered; an act be not done or attempted; that a payment be 
made. A decision is founded on reasons which are sometimes 
stated in connection with the judgment, but need not be. In 
most cases of first instance, or original trial, they are not stated 
at all; summary decisions, as on evidence, in the course of a trial 
are generally not stated at all, and in courts of appeal, there are 
multitudes of decisions, e. g., in the New York court of appeals, 
which are rendered, on the judgment below, without any reasons 
being given. The recall of a decision therefore must mean either 
that the judgment or decree is to be cancelled, or that the opinion 
is to be cancelled, or both. If opinions were to be cancelled, the 
natural result would be for judges to omit to give any reasons; 
which would tend to an opportunity for greater judicial tyranny 
than any that now exists; if both judgment and opinion were to 
be reversed, there would be no result in the litigation, and con- 
fusion would be introduced into the case; if judgments were to 
be recalled, the same confusion would be introduced, without any 
advantage. If some principle of law, on which the judgment 
was founded, were to be recalled, this would be a change in the 
law by the legislature or the electorate, in so far nullifying the 
work of the court, putting, in the one case, the legislature above 
the courts, whereas the fundamental idea of our judicial system 
is that this shall never be done; in the other, enabling the elec- 
torate to change the existing law by chance vote, which is also 
fundamentally opposed to the orderly administration of justice, 
as known to civilized man. Such returns to pristine barbarism 
have not been proposed, so far as I know, since the Athenians 
made law and recalled it through decisions ad hoc, in mass-meet- 
ing, and changed their reasons to suit the case, as it arose — one 
of the worst blots on the civilization of the Athenian state. 



LIMITATIONS 177 

parently works better in the Federal than in 
the State system, the Federal judiciary being, 
for reasons already stated, a more powerful and 
responsible bench. In fact, it may be said here 
that those who deplore the weakening of the 
importance of State rights in our system over- 
look the fact that it is connected with the decline 
of the State judiciary owing to the elective sys- 
tem. With a subservient judiciary ready to 
vary or interpret the law to suit the legislature 
and the executive, the whole system of consti- 
tutional limitations which has been the key to 
the stability of the government would be swept 
away. As already pointed out, there is nothing 
that popular bodies like legislatures are fonder 
of than confiscation of property. It sometimes 
takes the form of out-and-out spoHation, some- 
times that of pretended regulation. The Hne 
between the two is not easy to draw and noth- 
ing in our experience warrants us in trusting the 
legislature to draw it. We accordingly intrust 
the task to the courts, and under the fifth or the 
fourteenth amendment they hold that confisca- 
tory legislation is not within the powers of either 
Congress or the States. But that is all that pro- 
tects us. Make the judges subservient to the 



178 THE DEMOCRATIC MISTAKE 

machine or the party, either by making them 
elective or by packing the courts, or in any other 
way, and there is nothing that stands in the way 
of assaults on property leading to confiscation 
on a great scale. 

The last thirty years, and especially the last 
three or four, have been remarkable for attacks 
on property and remarkable attempts to pro- 
duce subserviency among judges. Of these, the 
most insidious and most dangerous is the at- 
tempt to pass a bill to take away or hamper their 
power to enforce their own decrees. The power 
to enforce law, or declare a law unconstitutional 
is of little value unless illegal acts can be pre- 
vented, and one of the ordinary ways of prevent- 
ing operation is by means of an injunction, i. e., 
the anticipation and prevention of wrong. In 
order to cripple the courts in labor disputes, the 
demagogues have been endeavoring for years 
to pass a bill practically destroying the power 
of a court to enforce an injunction summarily, 
or, in other words, to make its own decrees 
respected. But no such law can be confined to 
labor disputes. It will apply to all disputes, 
and the moment such a law is actually enforced 
the authority of the court is undermined. 



LIMITATIONS 179 

The enormous importance of the subject can- 
not be exaggerated. We have staked the per- 
manence of our system on the judiciary on one 
side, exactly as we have staked it upon the vigi- 
lance, character, and intellect of the community 
at large on the other. We have greatly impaired 
the efficiency of the latter by allowing machine 
government to fasten its hold upon the legisla- 
tive branch; if we now do not protect the ju- 
diciary by every means in our power, our case 
will certainly be worse than it is now. 

If these views are sound, the survey which we 
have taken of the operation of our government 
points to some definite conclusions. In the first 
place, we have in the government of the United 
States the first attempt on a great scale to intro- 
duce into the working of a free government the 
fundamental principles of delegation and re- 
sponsibility to the people. This is accomplished 
in our Constitution partly by a system of checks 
and balances and limitations of power, which 
have thus far answered remarkably well the ex- 
pectations of the designers. Their great dread 
was that they could not establish a permanent 
union, and that the country would be split up, 
as Europe has been, into states hostile to each 



i8o THE DEMOCRATIC MISTAKE 

other, armed against each other, and frequently 
at war with one another. From the beginning 
of the world, internal dissension and external 
violence had been the bane of republics never 
large enough to be secure. To prevent this, they 
made a federation of a totally new kind, in 
which the States retained their sovereignty 
within a certain field, but their citizens became 
directly responsible to the central government. 

It was the imagined retention by the States of 
the sovereign right to withdraw from the Union, 
which was only another word for the irresponsi- 
bility which they had once enjoyed, which led 
to that aggrandizement of State rights that 
ended in secession and the Civil War. The 
principle of union was vindicated, unhappily 
through war, and the irresponsibility of the 
States disappeared. It was the result of the 
Civil War which justified everything that the 
expounders of the Constitution had said about 
the impossibiHty of a strong free government 
which had nothing to keep it going but a treaty 
between equals, which equals might tear up. 

The system of checks, balances, and limita- 
tions relating to the executive, legislative, and 
judiciary has thus far proved its value by 



LIMITATIONS i8i 

maintaining the organs of government in much 
the same relative position which they occupied 
a hundred years ago. 

But other forces have since been called into 
play which were never dreamed of by the 
founders of the government. 

These forces, so far as they have been called 
into play by design, have rested on a fallacy with 
regard to responsibihty to the people — the fun- 
damental dogma of any free government — the 
mistaken idea that the way to attain it was the 
selection of all the agents of government by fre- 
quent elections or appointments for short terms. 
The result of this, combined with universal suf- 
frage, was to introduce into the executive ser- 
vice all the evils of rotation in office, and in the 
State judicial service all the evils of an elective 
judiciary, and in public life in general to turn 
over in great measure to an organized and 
ubiquitous and irresponsible ''organization" all 
nominations to office; thus often accomplish- 
ing the end of vesting the substance of power 
in the irresponsible controller of the machine, 
and taking away all responsibility to the people. 

To aggravate the difficulties which we have 
been considering tend all efforts to increase the 



i82 THE DEMOCRATIC MISTAKE 

sphere of the government. A remarkable feat- 
ure of the government of the United States was 
supposed to be that alone among the great pow- 
ers its sphere of action was strictly limited. The 
great body of powers inherent in any sovereign 
state, relating to education, health, morals, po- 
lice, and order, the security of life, person, and 
property, were within control of the States, 
where they were before the Federal government 
was formed. This used to be thought a great 
safeguard against centraHzation. No new func- 
tions could be confided to the general govern- 
ment except by the amendment of the Consti- 
tution. But here the force of circumstances has 
been too great to enable the States to retain their 
original power to its full extent. Circumstances 
have changed. Improvements in communication 
never before imagined possible have brought 
the ends of the country to each other, so that 
many things originally local have in fact ceased 
to be so. The railroads, for instance, have be- 
come a net-work of lines extending across the 
boundaries of States as national highways, and 
under the circumstances it is natural that the 
courts should gain a jurisdiction over these, under 
the Constitution itself, which could not have 



LIMITATIONS 183 

entered into the mind of anybody before rail- 
roads were built. In this way the sphere of the 
Federal government has been, without consti- 
tutional amendment, from time to time enor- 
mously enlarged. At the same time that of State 
government has been enlarged in other ways. 

And we must not forget that the distinction 
between State and Federal jurisdiction is not 
binding on the machine. The machine, which is 
nothing but a congeries of committees or smaller 
machines, is ubiquitous and pervasive. Any 
particular machine is coextensive with the lo- 
cality covered by the duties of an elective offi- 
cer, but any particular machine is a part of the 
whole. The national committees are a part of 
it, but so are all the committees in the various 
States and towns which send out invitations to 
attend primaries and conventions. 

Whatever enlarges the total sphere of the Fed- 
eral and State governments also increases the 
power of the machine as a whole. The enlarge- 
ment of the sphere of any government is always 
accompanied and made possible by the increase 
in the number of offices, and we must therefore 
admit that the continual enlargement in the 
sphere of Federal and State governments has 



i84 THE DEMOCRATIC MISTAKE 

greatly strengthened the machine. Not a year 
passes that some new scheme is not brought for- 
ward for supervising or regulating, or reform- 
ing human activity, or regulating property in 
some way, in the interest of health, morals, 
justice, or education. Behind these movements 
come an army of applicants for office; and 
office, except so far as the civil-service rules 
apply, they must obtain through the machine. 
The extension of the sphere of government, the 
dream of the socialist, is bread and meat to the 
boss. In fact, universal socialism, with no arti- 
ficial limitations on power of any kind, and with 
all the offices elective, and the terms, say six 
months, would be a machine paradise. I have 
endeavored to keep out of view questions con- 
nected with the sphere of government because 
they are different in most respects from questions 
concerning the operation of government. But 
here they mingle, and it is out of the question 
to shut our eyes to the fact. 

For the same reason that I have avoided 
discussing the sphere of government, I have 
avoided going into the question of any but 
artificial limitations; natural and economic law 
impose limitations more severe and inevitable 



LIMITATIONS 185 

than any that can be contrived by the wit of 
man. The old story of Canute and the sea 
shows that the fact of there being natural limits 
to political power was long ago familiar. Dem- 
agogues who propose to the democratic sov- 
ereign acts in defiance of natural laws play the 
part of the courtiers in the story. 

On these natural limits of political action, 
laws, and votes, and even constitutions, have no 
effect. And the curious and very satisfactory 
fact in connection with this is, that the freer the 
world becomes the more impotent to override 
these natural limits governments become. In 
small primitive communities shut up within 
narrow boundaries, and with poor means of 
communication with the world outside, the nat- 
ural law has less power; but once throw the 
whole world open and make communication 
easy and rapid and constant, and political 
power to interfere with natural law becomes 
weaker. It was comparatively easy to make 
Sparta a permanent camp, because Lacedemo- 
nians who did not like the system had no other 
to choose. You cannot turn a modern country 
into a Sparta because citizens will take a train 
or a boat for some other place, taking their 



1 86 THE DEMOCRATIC MISTAKE 

wives and families with them, where they can 
live on easier terms. So that in modern free 
states the government has to take such military 
institutions as the people will submit to. 

That this is the case — that the most important 
of all limitations are those imposed by nature — 
seems to be an extraordinarily hard lesson to 
learn: witness the still wide-spread belief that 
poHtical economy, which is merely an explana- 
tion of facts illustrating the working of human 
motive under certain circumstances, is an inven- 
tion of capitalists and their friends for the spo- 
liation of the poor. It has been said that indi- 
vidual experience is practically the only way 
in which the working man learns that if A is 
forced to give as much for eight hours' work as 
B in another place gives for ten hours, A will 
take his work to the other place; or that a 
laborer cannot get out of the same production 
the same wages while doing less work; or that 
it is a delusion that a laborer can force a higher 
rate of wages for a less amount of work; or that 
government can enable him to do so. 

These limits imposed by nature on political 
contrivances are at the present time very un- 
popular, and the doctrine is preached that they 



LIMITATIONS 187 

are not permanent limitations upon social forces, 
which are supreme. But these natural laws or 
permanent facts have an important bearing on 
the great question of the sphere of government. 
Those who disbelieve in them have no reason for 
doubting that the sphere of government can be 
extended in any direction, and for any object, 
and that the best government is that which 
governs most.^ 

1 The true theory of the sphere of government, to judge of the 
future by the past, will no longer be an abstract one — that of 
the "least government"; but it may perhaps be based on the 
practical study of what government is forced to do and what in 
particular fields it cannot do. One principle at the bottom, 
may turn out to be that where uniformity is necessary, govern- 
ment must give it, because it alone can give it. It must settle the 
calendar; it must give us a standard of weights and measures, and 
the currency; it must tax us; it must make war and peace; it 
must provide for the administration of justice; it must regulate 
and make responsible all incorporated bodies; and, finally, though 
this is not a very popular idea just now, it must see, when it 
establishes a system of property rights, and those rights become 
vested in individuals on the faith of the system, that they are 
never divested without compensation. On the other hand, where 
uniformity is unnecessary, and where divergence is innocent, it 
must be made to keep its hands off; where responsibility and lim- 
itations are concerned, it must be made to follow the system of 
responsibility and limitations revealed as the best from time to 
time by human study and inquiry; in whatever field experience 
proves that its citizens can promote their highest good for them- 
selves, without inspection, or repression, or promotion, or taxa- 
tion, whether it be religion, education, charity, dress, art, litera- 
ture, or recreation, let it bid them God-speed and leave them alone 
to their own devices. 



LECTURE VI 
THE SUFFRAGE 



THE SUFFRAGE 

Universal suffrage has become so much a part 
of our daily lives that we are apt to forget how 
very modern a contrivance it is, how little we 
have studied its use, and that it is always on its 
trial. There are still living a very few who 
can remember when it was still a novelty in 
this country; down to a comparatively recent 
period there were many who hoped to see it 
fail and perish. If I remember right, it was 
introduced into South America before it came 
into use in the United States; and, while it 
had been introduced there before, plebiscites 
were made the foundation of the second em- 
pire in France at very nearly the same time 
that it was being substituted for suffrage based 
on property here. Since then it has spread over 
the world, and wherever popular government 
has made any headway the old restrictions on 
the suffrage have been in great measure swept 
away. In empires and monarchies, so far as 

these have opened their doors to popular insti- 

191 



192 THE DEMOCRATIC MISTAKE 

tutions, the basis of the suffrage has been made 
wide. In England and in this country the only- 
question supposed to be open for discussion is 
whether it ought to be extended to women. 

The great advantage of the use of universal 
suffrage for the settlement of political questions 
of the first magnitude is that it is very effective 
in making a settlement final. When a proposal 
has been before the pubHc for years, has been 
thoroughly debated and discussed in all possible 
aspects, and has finally been voted upon and 
either accepted or rejected by the whole commu- 
nity, there is necessarily a general acquiescence 
in the result, partly because that is the usual 
way of settling the dispute, and also because it 
is impossible as a general thing to get together 
the partisans of a lost cause to renew the fight. 
In the field of practical government, a decisive 
vote plays the same part that a decisive victory 
does in war. The means of going on with the 
struggle are not wholly exhausted, but there is 
no longer any reason for expecting a continuance 
of the struggle to produce any different result. 

This of itself, however, is not enough. If uni- 
versal suffrage merely settled matters, it might 
still settle them so badly that it would com- 



THE SUFFRAGE 193 

pletely discredit itself. Force and violence and 
chance will all settle matters in some way, and 
it is only if universal suffrage settles them on 
the whole as well as can be expected that its 
introduction will in the long run be justified. 

The friends of universal suffrage have, in the 
history of this country for the past two genera- 
tions, much to point to in their favor. It was to 
the decision of universal suffrage that both par- 
ties appealed in turn on each of the following 
momentous questions, which may be said to 
have determined the course of our history from 
1850 to the present time — the restriction of 
slavery and its exclusion from the territories; 
the support of the necessary measures for carry- 
ing on the war during the rebellion; the at- 
tempted repudiation of the national debt; the 
policy of reconstruction, civil-service reform, 
and the gold standard. That is to say, on all 
these critical questions the appeal was to the 
ballot, which in every case finally sustained those 
who took the side which we confidently expect 
will prove in the end to have been the right 
side. 

We may perhaps be able to add to these tri- 
umphs the decision of the long battle now waging 



194 THE DEMOCRATIC MISTAKE 

between what is called Bryanism and constitu- 
tional government, i. e., between socialistic at- 
tempts to make the government an engine for 
the redistribution of wealth through the destruc- 
tion of the constitutional power of the courts to 
enforce their own decrees and to protect prop- 
erty. If so, I think there will be a general ad- 
mission that universal suffrage has answered the 
first great practical test applied to it pretty well, 
and to have justified the expectations of the orig- 
inal advocates of the theory of popular govern- 
ment. For the foundations of that theory we 
have to go back, as already explained, not to 
Rousseau or Jefferson, but to Bentham, who was 
the first writer on government to furnish the 
utilitarian reasons for a belief in it. It being 
settled that the welfare of the community is the 
object of government, how is this to be secured? 
His answer was that since this welfare was con- 
tinually threatened on every side by sinister 
interests, and factions deriving their support 
from them, the only way to secure it was to de- 
fend it through the power of the only class whose 
interest was that welfare, that is, the power of 
the whole community itself, exercised freely — 
that is, through the secret ballot. But the suf- 



THE SUFFRAGE 195 

frage of the whole community is universal suf- 
frage, and the instances given are instances of 
the triumph of the interests of the whole com- 
munity over special interests, and what used to 
be called faction connected with them. Al- 
though it is dangerous to reason from one coun- 
try to another, especially to a country of a dif- 
ferent race, language, rehgion, and laws, it may 
be suggested that the superior stability of the 
present French republic over the governments 
which preceded it shows that the working of 
universal suffrage, when perfectly free, is to- 
ward a satisfactory settlement of questions. Of 
course, when universal suffrage is more or less 
under the control of the executive it may produce 
surprisingly different results; under the second 
empire it supported arbitrary government; in 
South America it can be turned first to the sup- 
port of one revolution, then of another; but, 
when it is free, it seems to have the power of 
furnishing the great virtue of strength and per- 
manence to the policy of the state. 

Nor is there any reason for thinking universal 
suffrage a bad contrivance for determining which 
among a number of candidates for high and con- 
spicuous executive office is the best, provided 



196 THE DEMOCRATIC MISTAKE 

the candidates have been a long time before the 
public and their merits thoroughly canvassed 
fro and con. The successful candidates for the 
presidency in the last sixty years have compared 
favorably with those of the previous half-cen- 
tury, while conspicuous defeats of inferior can- 
didates have helped to re-enforce the proof. The 
two elections of Lincoln, the two elections of 
Cleveland, the defeats of Greeley, Butler, and 
Bryan, seem in retrospect to show that the peo- 
ple as a whole are at least as likely to decide well 
as the old constituencies founded on property 
were. Its magnates have shown, perhaps, less 
originality than those of the earher period, but 
the whole world is thought by many persons to 
have been more full of originality and character 
under the old regime than it is now. The tre- 
mendous absorption of the most powerful and 
ambitious minds in money-getting is enough to 
account for this in great measure. 

It is not here that the abuse of universal suf- 
frage is apparent, but in the attempt to use it 
as a universal test for the settlement of all 
questions, no matter whether the electorate has 
had time to consider them or not, and to use it 
as the every-day machinery for enforcing that 



THE SUFFRAGE 197 

"responsibility to the people" without which 
popular government cannot last. 

Universal suffrage, i.e., the general electorate, 
can answer a question yes or no successfully, or 
decide successfully between candidates for office 
placed before it, if much opportunity for deliber- 
ation and discussion precedes its use, and it is 
only used at considerable intervals of time. As 
applied to elections, it can only exercise an in- 
telligent choice as to a small number of offices. 
The shorter the intervals and the greater the 
number of offices, the less opportunity for de- 
liberation and discussion in the electorate, the 
greater the power of the machine, and the less 
the responsibility to the people. 

There are some things which it cannot or- 
dinarily do. Direct primaries are a contrivance 
for as near an approach as may be to the use of 
universal suffrage, or ** direct democracy" {i. e., 
the entire electorate, as divided into parties), 
for the business of nominating to office. Direct 
primaries would apply to any office from Presi- 
dent and senators down. 

The question here, of course, is not whether 
the election secures responsibility in office, but 
whether the nomination is really by the elector^ 



198 THE DEMOCRATIC MISTAKE 

ate. If my view of the subject is correct, the 
electorate cannot, of its own motion, make or- 
dinary nominations. Nomination to office usu- 
ally is the work of one man or a small num- 
ber of men, not of the pubhc at large. You 
cannot canvass the fitness of a man, or get up a 
"ticket," or slate, by means of it. Hence, pri- 
maries, whether of the old-fashioned kind or di- 
rect primaries, will rarely do more than ratify 
names from a list already prepared by somebody. 
The old caucus nominated, and a caucus can 
nominate to-day, but this is because a caucus is 
a small and secret body in which it is possible 
to discuss the thousand and one delicate ques- 
tions which enter into a nomination without 
dread of consequences; but the delegate con- 
vention, invented to take the place of the caucus 
and make nominations more popular, has seldom 
done anything more than ratify nominations pre- 
pared for it. If the successful man is a favorite, 
his name is brought to the convention by his 
supporters; if he is a "dark horse," the moment 
when his name is to be made known is prear- 
ranged. Of real public debate of quahfications 
of candidates, even in a delegate convention, 
there is rarely any. The function of the con- 



THE SUFFRAGE 199 

vention is to vote; its speeches are perfunctory 
** presentations" of candidates. 

Exceptions prove the rule. Occasions now and 
then arise when a very conspicuous man is forced 
into nomination to high office by a general con- 
sensus of opinion. The first nomination of Wash- 
ington, the second of Lincoln, the nomination of 
Mr. Tilden against the wishes of the machine, 
the second nomination of Mr. Cleveland, and 
the nomination in New York of Governor 
Hughes are instances in point. But in such cases 
almost any machinery would work in the same 
way; the press usually proclaims and advertises 
the popular demand, and the machine gladly 
accepts, or is forced to take the candidate, ex- 
actly as if it had received a mandate from the 
electorate.^ 

^The authors of the Federalist have been criticised for not 
perceiving in advance that the business of nomination for office 
is not generally adapted to the canvassing of the constituency 
itself. The constituencies which they had in mind, however, 
were small, the suffrage was restricted, and the number of offices 
which they had in mind was also small. It certainly does not lie 
in the mouth of the introducers of direct primaries to criticise 
them on this account, for their mistake consisted in thinking that 
nominations would be managed by direct primary consultation 
of voters under circumstances vastly more advantageous to the 
experiment than those of our time. At this date (May, 1912) 
there are in Kansas — a typical Western community — 10 State 
officers to be elected, 3 justices of the State Supreme Court, i 
United States Senator, 8 Congressmen, 13 county officers, 125 



200 THE DEMOCRATIC MISTAKE 

To go back to the question of the possibility 
of obtaining responsibility, the original idea was 
that if the representative (to confine the matter 
to the legislature) did not turn out well, he would 
lose his seat. But when elections are frequent, 
and there is no time for the public opinion of 
the constituency to have become fixed on the 
conduct of the representative, and when the ma- 
chine supports him and gives him his nomina- 
tion, it becomes almost impossible for his con- 
stituency to enforce his responsibihty. I think 
it may fairly be said that the amount of individ- 
ual responsibility obtained to-day in the United 
States by the operation of universal suffrage 
upon the legislature and Congress is at its lowest 
ebb. We have already considered how the mat- 
ter stands with respect to the nominations of 
administrative officers which have been made 
elective. 

State representatives, 40 State senators, and 10 presidential elec- 
tors. It is said that four parties will have candidates for the 
State offices, and that there will be at least three for each county 
position. It is calculated by the Secretary of State that a body 
of 8,000 men are or have been circulating nomination petitions. 
He therefore suggests a new scheme for the purpose of restrict- 
ing the number of candidates and reducing the volume of nomi- 
nating business, by providing that there shall be an entrance 
fee for candidates, the candidate for governor or member of Con- 
gress, for instance, paying $150, while for a county office the 
stake might be lowered to ^10. 



THE SUFFRAGE 201 

It may be said that every government tends 
to perish through the idolatry of its own fetish. 
The fetish of despotism is arbitrary power; it 
is appHed to everything; all questions are set- 
tled by it, and it finally works out its own de- 
struction and the state's (mihtary empires, such 
as Alexander's and those of the two Napoleon-s, 
are familiar instances), leaving a crippled com- 
munity behind to work out its own salvation 
as best it may. The fetish of aristocracy is priv- 
ilege; it resorts to privilege as the oracle to 
answer any question. Down to the middle of 
the eighteenth century, the whole of Europe was 
a net-work of privileges and correlated duties 
originally embodied in the feudal system. When 
Mirabeau was asked how he came to be such a 
believer in equality, he said that he did not care 
much about it for its own sake, but had taken it 
as the best club with which to attack privilege. 

Democracy has at least two idols, of which one 
is the false worship of equality as always an end 
in itself, and which treats it as an object of 
government to introduce equaHty, not merely of 
right and opportunity, but of condition; the 
other, the worship of the ballot as a universal 
means of curing all ills and enforcing responsi- 



202 THE DEMOCRATIC MISTAKE 

bility. The inevitable result is the continuous 
exercise of elective machinery, the multiplica- 
tion of elections and of offices, and the division 
and dissipation of responsibility for the better 
division of patronage and spoils. Either the 
state must be exhausted by the expense and 
general irresponsibiHty entailed, or it must 
abandon its idols and give up the false theory 
of responsibility which deludes their worship- 
pers. Of one thing we may be always sure, 
that to the community at large good govern- 
ment will always be vastly more important than 
the forms by which it is secured, and that in 
its effort to furnish this, any form of govern- 
ment is always on its trial. 

For those who do not believe in the power of 
free institutions to right themselves can always 
point to two very serious defects in democratic 
tendencies which have always marked it when- 
ever it has been introduced — its tendency to at- 
tack property and try to alter by legislation the 
natural law which gives the control of it in the 
long run to the thrifty, the industrious, and the 
ambitious, and the tendency to invoke in aid 
of this process all the power of a centralized 
government, more and more centralized for the 



THE SUFFRAGE 203 

purpose. Socialism and centralization are other 
names for these tendencies. With them have 
often gone in the past imperialism and militar- 
ism. In other words, it is absolutely true there 
is an inherent tendency in democracy to pro- 
duce its opposite — despotism, and we see plenty 
of evidence of it about us. 

Those who maintain, as we maintain, that 
democracy has still the power within it to rectify 
its course must, if the view taken here is correct, 
rest our case on the belief that the basis of the 
government — the general state of character and 
opinion in the electorate — is sound, and that a 
way will be found to substitute a true for a false 
theory of responsibiHty. The absurd worship 
of a ridiculous idea inherited from the past, 
that if we can only vote often enough, and have 
as many elective offices as possible, we shall se- 
cure responsibiHty to the people, is the highway 
to failure. If it were true, we should inhabit a 
poKtical paradise in New York. On election day 
with us every one votes for a dozen candidates 
whose very existence, except that their names 
appear on the ballot, is unknown to him; and 
if he wishes to study his rights and duties as a 
voter, he is referred to a technical volume of 



204 THE DEMOCRATIC MISTAKE 

some five hundred pages, most of which is in- 
comprehensible except to trained experts, and 
told that this so-called election manual is the 
palladium of his Hberties, and that if it is not 
entirely intelligible he can consult a lawyer. 

Continuous suffrage is not a final solution of 
all the problems of government, nor an assur- 
ance of responsibility in government; to be suc- 
cessful it must be sparingly used, and only by 
electorates which are fitted for it, and only for 
questions about which there has been ample 
time for discussion and deliberation. 

Evidences of reaction against the false notion 
that responsibility can always be secured by a 
vote may be seen in several quarters. Negro 
suffrage in the South, apparently made neces- 
sary in the interest of reconstruction, disap- 
peared through the demonstration of its own 
irresponsibility. Deplorable as this result may 
seem in the light of our aspirations for equality, 
it is undoubtedly more in the interest of good 
government than equal suffrage supported by 
bayonets and ruining civilization, such as re- 
construction forced upon us to establish tem- 
porarily in the South. And it is a perfect 
illustration of how little the community, in 



THE SUFFRAGE 205 

the long run, cares about an abstraction as 
compared with good government, that the 
most languid interest has been taken, through- 
out the country at large, in the fact that the 
South has refused to tolerate the political 
equality of the races. The same thing may be 
said of the general acquiescence of the country 
in the aboKtion of the suffrage altogether in the 
District of Columbia. Washington has been 
governed for a generation by an appointed com- 
mission. Those who choose to live in the capital 
of the United States have no vote. To be sure, 
the question was complicated by Washington 
having a large negro population; but it was not 
made a race question. The real reason why 
Washington was disfranchised, to the general 
satisfaction of everybody, was that universal 
suffrage as applied in our way through constant 
elections and for a multitude of officers had re- 
sulted in wide-spread corruption and virtual 
bankruptcy. 

And it is beginning to be seen now that the use 
of universal suffrage, as we have attempted to 
use it, inevitably tends to produce the same re- 
sult everywhere; and in more than one instance, 
in smaller municipalities, the system has been 



2o6 THE DEMOCRATIC MISTAKE 

temporarily swept away, and for It substituted 
a commission charged with plenary powers of 
government, itself elective, but holding office for 
a sufficient time to secure responsibility, and 
ridding the city meanwhile of the whole net- 
work of subordinate electoral machinery which 
produces what we call the machine.^ 

If the difficulties under which New York and 
Boston are represented by their press as laboring 
were attacked, as I have suggested, by substitut- 
ing for their present system a commission with 
full powers, elected by universal suff'rage, with 
a tenure of office lasting for a number of years, 
it would violate no principle of popular govern- 
ment, and would for the time put an end to the 
business of the local machine. If such a com- 
mission, with a mayor at the head of it, were 
adopted as a permanent form of government, the 
local machine would go out of business. It must 
be remembered that the work of governing these 
great cities in which we live, and which contain 
half our population, is almost altogether admin- 
istrative; it consists almost entirely of the work 
of policing, of sanitation, of care of streets and 

^ For a full account of the growth of the commission system since 
this was written, see "Commission Government in American 
Cities," by Ernest S. Bradford (Macmillan, 191 1). 



THE SUFFRAGE 207 

bridges, of parks and public places. The laws 
affecting life, liberty, and property are passed 
by the legislature; justice is administered by 
courts estabhshed by the State. Municipal ad- 
ministration is almost wholly administrative. 

As responsibihty is broken down through 
short tenure and frequent elections, it must be 
restored through their opposites, longer tenure 
and fewer elections. The movement for biennial 
legislatures has already been referred to. A 
regular triennial legislature is probably all that 
is needed, and with this, of course, lengthening 
of tenure of executive terms. 

To get responsibility you have got to get re- 
sponsible men for the offices, and responsible 
men mean men who are trusted for a time long 
enough to give them an opportunity to show 
their character. You cannot get a responsible 
man for a post involving the exercise of author- 
ity if you tell him, "I am going to make you 
responsible for this work, or the administration 
of this office, but if I Hke to make a change I 
am going to put in a new man in your place at 
the end of a year." The person selected will 
answer, if he is capable of responsibility, "I can- 
not take the place on such terms. You must 



2o8 THE DEMOCRATIC MISTAKE 

give me time to make preparations, to actually 
accomplish something, to show what I can do." 
It may be said that there is a law of responsible 
tenure — that to secure responsibility the tenure 
must be at least sufficiently long to enable the 
incumbent to show that he has met the require- 
ments or is unfit for them. 

One of the favorite delusions of the subject is 
that higher salaries will of themselves increase 
responsibility. Higher salaries may make it 
possible for a better class of men to take the 
office, as in the case of judges, but they will not 
of themselves produce responsibility. In New 
York the salaries of judges are, for this country, 
high, but it has not made them much better — 
most of them owe both salary and office to the 
head of Tammany Hall, who can take away 
both. The Federal judges, with long tenure 
and lower salaries, are far better illustrations of 
responsibility in office. The lengthening of ju- 
dicial tenure in New York has, it is believed, 
produced an improvement. 

To review now the whole field, we began with 
a statement that a principle underlying all 
government was responsibility to the sovereign, 
which in popular government necessarily means 



THE SUFFRAGE 209 

responsibility to the people. So far as popular 
government attains its ends it must be through 
responsible agents, and consequently the fun- 
damental question with reference to government 
in this aspect is, How is responsibility to be se- 
cured and maintained r Two answers only have 
been given to the question, one that which is em- 
bodied in the Federal Constitution, and the 
other that which is derived from the writings 
and teachings of doctrinaires, some of them no 
doubt great men, but doctrinaires on this point 
because they undertook to deduce from an en- 
tirely sound principle relating to sovereignty a 
doctrine of universal application by which all 
political questions would be answered — the doc- 
trine that to secure responsibility all that was 
necessary was to make an agent of the govern- 
ment elective and to give him a very short 
term of office. Acting upon this mistake, they 
embodied it in the later State constitutions, and, 
having first introduced universal suffrage, ap- 
plied it in time, not merely to legislatures, where 
only it had its original justification in the long 
historical struggle with the executive, but to 
judges, governors, sheriffs, prosecuting officers, 
and almost every official, town, county, and State, 



2IO THE DEMOCRATIC MISTAKE 

throughout the commonwealth. Meanwhile, by 
a further and most grotesque misapplication of 
the same idea, it was introduced into the Fed- 
eral service in the form of a civil service with a 
tenure lasting no longer than that of the appoint- 
ing power, accompanied further by the ancient 
doctrine of "rotation"; "rotation," kindled into 
new life by the delusion of frequent elections of 
representatives, was applied to a branch of the 
public service in which election had no place, 
and in which "rotation" meant patronage, and 
patronage, as always, meant favor or corrup- 
tion. By this means was originally established 
throughout the Union what is known as the 
machine — which sapped the foundations of re- 
sponsibiUty in the Federal service by parcelling 
out among senators and representatives the ap- 
pointments for which the Constitution made the 
President responsible. Side by side with this 
grew up the congeries of nominating committees 
and primaries, which found its ripest local ex- 
pression in Tammany Hall, and its wonderful 
congener, the New York Republican "organiza- 
tion," and which is aptly designated whenever 
it works smoothly as the machine, an organiza- 
tion of politicians and "workers" wholly irre- 



THE SUFFRAGE 211 

sponsible to the government, which determines 
who shall and who shall not be nominated and 
voted for; which, embodied in the primaries, 
sends its delegates to the conventions, while 
these in time fill the legislature with creatures so 
dependent that (to adopt the term which Jus- 
tice Hughes used of delegates) they too might 
as well on all critical occasions be "inanimate." 
This machinery very soon became so perfect 
that it extended its operations to Washington, 
and there began to fill the seats of senators and 
representatives with puppets of the machine. 

A later stage, in which the working of the ma- 
chinery becomes well understood and rich men 
find that it can be conveniently used to get them- 
selves or their agents into the Senate or the 
presidency need not be discussed here, but ob- 
viously it does not promote responsibility to the 
people. 

The main thing to bear in mind is that the 
constant tendency of any such system is uni- 
versal irresponsibility, i. e., the disintegration of 
government itself. An agent of the government 
is nominally responsible to the President, but 
actually holds his power subject to the favor 
of the "senior Senator" from North Utopia; 



212 THE DEMOCRATIC MISTAKE 

another is responsible to the electorate for the 
discharge of his duties as a judge, but actually 
to the manager of the "Hall," for whom or for 
whose friends he is expected to use his patronage 
in return. The bipartisan commission of gas, 
electricity, water, telephone, and telegraph, 
nominally responsible in office, first divides its 
power into functions corresponding with the 
differentiation of its patronage; then makes its 
respective members channels through which the 
gas contracts and the electricity jobs and the 
contracts and jobs connected with water, tele- 
phone, and telegraph find their proper outlet — 
as arranged by the irresponsible boss or com- 
mittee at whose instance the respective salaries 
of the irresponsible commissioners are placed at 
their disposal. 

At the whole wonderful system the first effec- 
tive blow that was ever struck was the introduc- 
tion of the merit system in the Federal civil ser- 
vice, supplemented now by the same system in 
States and cities. This has had the effect of 
making responsible to the people several hundred 
thousand government agents, who were before 
paid by the government, but owed what tenure 
they could boast to unknown, or only too well 



THE SUFFRAGE 213 

known, persons (themselves not responsible for 
the conseqenuces in anyway). So far the conse- 
quences of the great democratic mistake as to 
responsibiHty have been brought to an end, or 
put in the way of being ended. 

At the electoral "machine," with its cohorts 
of workers and committees and delegates and 
*' bosses," hardly an eiFective blow has yet been 
struck. It often seems to be in prime vigor, but 
there are some indications that this is not so. At 
any rate, if the machine is to be destroyed it can 
only be through the introduction of responsible 
government in its place, and this can only be 
done by retracing our steps and abandoning the 
attempt to obtain responsibility through fre- 
quent elections and short terms and the multi- 
plication of offices. Universal suffrage must be 
left to solve the problems to which it is adapted 
— to answer the serious questions of state which 
in a republic can obtain no permanent settle- 
ment in any other way, and to decide who shall 
fill those offices of state which are not primarily 
judicial or administrative. 

All this perhaps throws some light on the 
question whether it is worth while at the present 
time to consider the question of woman suffrage. 



JG 38 IS12 



